


god of thinning dreams

by Errantmushroom



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, F/M, Fae!Kylo Ren, Queen!Snoke, Romance, Slow Burn, Unseelie Court
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-30
Updated: 2020-01-22
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:01:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 24,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22034491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Errantmushroom/pseuds/Errantmushroom
Summary: Kylo watches her for another long moment, feeling her rapid pulse jump beneath her throat, before he drops his hand and straightens, “You have old blood.” He says. “Your kin failed you in keeping it secret.”Rey opens her mouth, to say that she doesn’t have old blood, that she has cursed blood. To say that he has not answered her question at all, and that she still has no idea what he’s talking about, but he holds a single hand towards her and her words die in her mouth.“This is the land of fair folk, land of the lost and forgotten, home to the court of winter and the undying Queen. And girl, if you wish to have any hope of getting home, you will come with me.”
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 42
Kudos: 76





	1. come away, o human child

Rey watches the rain run skinny trails down the outside of the window pane. She catches the sigh in the back of her throat and lets it blow past her lips in a rush. Her breath fans a mist along the glass, running the greens and browns into a blurred mass.

“The longer you watch, the worse the weather will be.” Her aunt advises from her perch on the kitchen stool where she watches Rey through the serving hatch. Rey tears her eyes from the window to look at her aunt as she pops cherry tomatoes into her mouth, bursting the meat from its red skin with the flat of her teeth.

“Is it always like this?”

Her aunt shrugs, careless, and her long brown hair ripples off of her shoulder and onto her back. “You get used to it.” She says around a mouthful of tomato.

Rey can't help it - she sighs again, although it comes out sounding more like a groan, and she throws her back onto the couch. She digs her fingers into the dusty rose pattern that curls from the sides to the cushion and her feet hang off the edge, skimming the wood floor. She stares at the ceiling, which is only marginally better than the backs of her eyelids, imagining fantastic creatures in the shadowed grooves.

She can hear her aunt rustling around in the kitchen, then the gentle pad of her steps as she walks over to Rey. She leans over Rey who stubbornly avoids her gaze, then lifts her leg and prods Rey in the meat of her calf with one socked toe.

Her aunt rolls her eyes, big green marbles turning circles in her skull. “You kids are always so impatient,” she says it likes she’s annoyed, but there’s a laugh at the tip of her tongue, and she’s got a smirk on her lips. She jerks her head to the side. “I’ve got a pair of galoshes in the shoe closet by the door.”

Rey forgets to be irate about being referred to as a ‘kid’ and stares at her blankly. Her brain stutters slowly to life, the same way her beat up, ancient laptop does when she needs to work on it.

Her aunt nudges her with her toe again. “You know, galoshes? Rain boots?”

Rey nods dully, realization finally dawning on her. This country town was already working its magic on her, turning her mind to dust and cobwebs, her thoughts slow as syrup. She briefly wonders how long it will take before she is like the old goat her aunt has out back, chewing grass all day long with glazed-over eyes.

“Good, I need milk.” Her aunt says, turning around and walking back to the kitchen. “And don’t forget to take a coat!” She calls over her shoulder. 

Rey doesn't need to be told this twice. She is already bounding up to the front door, overeager with purpose. She pulls on her aunt’s beat up rain boots and a bright red coat, and she steps out into the rain.

* * *

Her aunt lives in what amounts to little more than a run down shack. Her aunt lovingly calls it a cottage, strokes the rough hewn wooden walls with her hands, and tsks when Rey corrects her with a huffy, “you mean hovel, Auntie.”

When Rey was around five or six, her parents had taken her along on a trip to the hardware store. It was the first time she could remember ever having been to one. Outside the store, there were sheds shaped like small houses. They had been painted red, or white, with matching little shutters on the outside and tiny gabled roofs on top.

She’d imagined that was the kind of home she would live in when she got older. A perfect home in miniature. This was the kind of place her aunt lived in, and now she understood why her parents laughed when she’d told them she wanted to live in one of the sheds outside of the hardware store.

As comely as it was from the outside, the inside of the home was cramped to suffocation, like living in a closet. A particularly cluttered closet that belonged to a hoarder and was filled to the brim with 70’s style furniture, and the distinct scent of musk sunk deep into the ancient floorboards.

Her aunt’s house nestles in the crook of an elbow of green, the last lone sentry after a small town that is home to a few hundred citizens. It is only a handful of miles up a beaten dirt path to the town, though traveling it feels much longer, as though one is fighting their against a strong current. It is the kind of place where people escape to when they are sick of being people. Rey understands that now.

Rey shudders beneath the confines of her broad coat. And not just because it is colder outside than she is used to, or because the rain has crept beneath her hood, dripped behind her ears and sliding down the curve of her neck to settle in the dimples along her spine. She has the bag of milk crushed in one fist, swinging it up and down as she walks. The rain slides off that too, turning the plastic slick and dewy.

She had come to this place to gather herself up. To _become_ , once again, but there is a pervasive depth here, a void, that does not lend itself to wholeness. It is a thing made to rip apart, and it tears at the smallest pieces of Rey that she has left of herself.

The town’s people eye her once over and then their gaze skims from her as though she is not even there. They do not care to know her, let alone see her. Rey’s aunt had warned her of something to that effect, that the people who lived here did not look outward, they only cared for their own, and they only saw what they wished to see.

Odd, small town folk, and the forest they cluster beside.

Rey walks the single rocky dirt road path that goes through the town. It only goes one way and then the other. East into town, west into the wood. The skinny road trails right past her aunt’s home and disappears into the trees, as though maybe at one time, the town had been larger, but the forest had long ago risen up and reclaimed its stolen land.

She doesn’t realize that she’s gone straight past her aunt’s home until she is staring up at the bowing tree branches. The wind whistles through the canopy and sends a shiver of silvery rain dancing to the ground.

Ages ago, people knew more about the trees and the things they hide then they do now. There is some of this that Rey’s matrilineal family remembers, that her mother and her aunt had spoken of in hushed voices when the sky had gone dark. Her father did not engage in this kind of talk, his family did not remember the things that hid in the trees.

The sisters had inherited their suspicions from their mother, and her mother before her, all the way back to the first mother. And if because of this they left buttered crumbs in the corners of their homes and sprigs of greenery in their doorways, well, no one dared to fight them on it.

Rey throws a glance over her shoulder. The little old cottage gazes steadily back at her, as though plucking at her will. Does the little mouse dare venture into the green? Rey’s aunt is not perched on the front steps, as she usually is, but Rey cannot imagine that she would be against her niece extending her walk by a little more time and a little more view. Her mother was always telling her to get more fresh air. And besides, it’s cold enough outside that the milk won’t go bad for a while.

The cottage is silent and still. It has always been here and it will always be here, a stone in the river that is time.

Rey takes a breath and steps into the forest.

* * *

Dull light drips into and between the gaps in the canopy above her and plays along the forest floor. The rain struggles to break through, and Rey lets her hood drop against her back so that she can feel the few, sparse drops settling on top of her hair.

The path is not clean, and she steps with the kind of care one reserves for cathedrals or catacombs. This place deserves the same kind of respect. Respect for the sacred. Respect for the dead.

Although careful, her steps still disturb the ground, crunching through layers of dead leaves from seasons long past, and into the thick black dirt beneath. The path is still here, the one that leads into the town that is now far behind her, though it is nearly entirely covered.

There are tall rocks dug into the ground to mark the way. They seem to peer at her as she walks between them, witnesses as she walks down the forest aisle.

The aisle leads deep into the forest, and as she follows it, the trees grow thicker and taller. They are older the further she walks, and their branches bow toward the ground, heavy with the weight of new leaves and years past, as though they are reaching for her.

She still clutches the bag holding the milk in one hand, and remembers it when she feels herself getting thirsty. She unscrews the lid and takes a swig. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and then puts the milk back into its bag, and lets it swing beside her hip.

She isn’t sure how long she walks. It feels like ages within a handful of minutes, like she could count them backwards, _one, two, three, four,_ with digits of her fingers, but slowly, so slowly. Eventually, abruptly, the path ends.

The path stops short at a large tree. It is wide enough around that it would take several people to wrap their arms around the trunk of it. Rey cannot tell if the path always ended here or if this tree simply up and grew one day, overtaking it and letting the forest behind it consume the rest.

The other trees around it are crowded like too many teeth in one’s mouth, growing practically on top of one another, though they give the large tree a wide berth. The tree demands space, has earned it in years and vitality. Its roots surge out of the ground and slide over one another in thick, looping tendrils, so tangled that Rey cannot tell where they begin and where they end.

Rey picks her way carefully around the roots and settles against the base of the tree, letting herself sit in its arms, the picture of mother and child. Her fingers dig into the dirt below the tree, feels the life in that black soil.

Rey’s own mother had loved the outdoors this way. Sitting against this ancient tree, her legs tangled in the roots, she is reminded her strongly of her mother.

Her mother who would sing quite madly to the weeds in their yard. Who would lie in bed for hours and hours, a sleeping _Sleeping Beauty_ with her dark curls spread out on the pillow beneath her head. Who would wander their home during the late night, pacing back and forth before the front door, a wounded animal in an open cage.

Your mother is not well, her father would hold her and whisper, but one day she will be, and one day is not so very far off. He’d kiss her forehead and take her to visit her grandparents, who would bake her fresh cookies and let her play in the sun. She’d come back and her mother would always be just the same as when she left.

Rey sighs and leans her head back against the trunk, clenching her eyes shut. She doesn’t want to think about her mother, or her father for that matter. She’d come here to forget about them, just as much as she could manage.

Her aunt Ami was her mother’s sister. She was odd, like Rey’s mother, with the same green eyes and sly smile, but Ami had none of that mania, and none of those terrible lows that had struck her mother into subservience.

Ami ate tomatoes raw and gardened on the trellis out back and never left the town she’d been born in, that she’d grown up in. Ami was safe, and probably happy, and most importantly, she was as far as Rey could come from her own childhood home and still be on planet Earth.

Rey wonders if she could ever be so lucky.

Then - there is a snap of dry twig. Rey's head swivels up. She hadn't even realized she'd put her face in her hands, weary with the weight of memory.

A sound is coming from the distance and moving closer, a rustling in the bushes that hadn’t been there before. Indeed, the forest had been quiet the entire time Rey had been within it.

It didn’t occur to Rey that she should find that odd. That there should be bird song and squirrels chirping in the branches, that the only sound in a forest should not have been the sound of her own feet on dried, dead leaves.

It occurs to her now, far too late, as the sound of something large moving through the briar reaches her ears. Something moving towards her.

The rustling is coming from in front of her, too large and loud to be a squirrel or a rabbit, and suddenly, so suddenly, she is aware of what a stupid mistake she has made. Coming into the woods alone on a rainy day after being sent on an errand. Her aunt might not realize she’s missing for hours. And who knows what dangers lurk behind all these trees and under the brush? She certainly doesn’t, a newcomer from a far away place.

Her aunt had warned of things - things that lived in dark places where people weren’t supposed to go. The places that people had left behind.

Rey shoves herself backwards with her feet, hard, digging her heels into the dirt and the roots. She scrabbles with the bark against her back and scratches her hands on the low-hanging branches.

She struggles to think, to come up with a better escape plan than quickly scooting away from the possible danger, but her thoughts crawl to her like they are moving through fog.

She is still pushing herself backwards, trying to get behind the tree, when there is a low howl from between the copse directly in front of her. It is alone, the call of a single wolf, and no others answer it.

Rey freezes and the wolf pushes its nose through the brush, as quickly as it had announced its presence, a phantom from the mist, a dark figure in the smoke.

He is as beautiful as he is monstrous, and for a moment they regard each other in singular curiosity, the tableau of predator and prey. The wolf is covered in a dense coat of downy grey fur, peppered black and white. She notices that he is larger than any wolf she has ever seen, in a zoo or on TV, he is massive. His paws leave craters in the leaf litter.

It is impossible, of course it is, but in that moment, he seems as large as a bear on four legs. After a moment, he tilts his nose to the air, inhaling the thick stench of human and of fear. 

Rey is still as a statue and tries not to breathe. She can’t remember the rules on wolves. Are you not supposed to move? Are you supposed to run as fast as you can and never look back?

She wishes suddenly that she’d paid more attention to the nature documentaries that her father was always watching, the ones droned on about wild animals and what to do if you were faced with one. She didn’t think you were ever supposed to _actually_ come face to face with one.

The beast levels his golden eyes with her own, and they are trapped in an eternal orbit for only a few seconds. He is looking for the weakness in her and then he has found it, because she sees his hackles begin to rise. A growl grows in his throat and his lips curl around his yellowed fangs. He digs his paws into the ground and then with all his strength, he launches himself at her.

Rey sucks in a breath and finds that she can’t scream. The only thing she can do is push herself up, halfway to her feet, and try to get away from the monster and his teeth and the bloodlust in his eyes. 

She launches herself backwards without a care because what behind her can possibly be worse than what is in front of her? But then the ground has disappeared from beneath her feet and she is falling. The world turns around and around above her. It is nothing but trees and ground, trees and ground, as her body batters itself against the forest floor, propelled by the pull of gravity. Her heart hammers against the inside of her chest but she can’t feel it, she can’t feel anything at all. 

She lands in a pile of limbs, tangled up in herself and her breaths coming in halted gasps. She struggles to right herself and then the wolf is on top of her. It lands on her with all of its weight. The air is crushed from her lungs and suddenly she is aware that she is going to die. The wolf’s heat wafts down onto her and its jaw will close over her throat.

She wants to close her eyes, if she shuts them then this will all go away, wash away in black. Like clenching your eyes shut against the dark, hiding in plain sight from the monsters in the room, if you can’t see them then they can’t see you.

But she can’t stop looking. Death is hypnotic. The beast wrenches himself forward, and then lifts off of her, his great paws dragging across her middle without digging into the soft flesh beneath. He groans and as soon as he is off, Rey shudders and curls in on herself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have had this sitting finished for a while but only just got around to posting it. The title of this story is from the song "Storms" by The Ballroom Thieves.
> 
> Chapters posted twice a week. The end fic will be around 90k long.
> 
> Comments/criticisms welcome.
> 
> Kylo appears in all his fae glory in the next chapter.
> 
> If anyone needs to discuss their post-TROS feels. PLEASE. I'm here for you.


	2. to the waters and the wild

Death never does come. Not then, anyway.

  
  


Rey’s fingers creep from her chest down to her stomach, carefully prodding at the soft flesh beneath her untorn clothes. Her breath comes in ragged, disbelieving gasps. The wolf’s claws hadn't left a single scratch on her.

  
  


She can’t believe it would just let her go. She imagines that the beast bears down on its haunches above her, waiting for her to show signs of life before tearing out her throat. Like a cat batting a mouse between its paws, the wolf did not care to kill her without making game of her first.

  
  


She should just stay like this, she thinks, curled on the forest ground, probably forever if it means that she doesn't have to die. She _should_ stay like this, but her limbs ache like fire and she is fairly certain that she managed to bruise some ribs on her tumble down the hill because it hurts just to breathe.

  
  


She strains her ears to listen for the wolf, for anything, but all she can hear is the sound of her own breath, shaking in and out between her lips.

  
  


After a few long moments, knowing her life hangs in the balance of making one stupid decision after another, she carefully unfolds herself, wincing at the lancing pain in her arms and legs, and finds herself looking straight into a pair of gleaming, beetle-black eyes.

  
  


Not-wolf eyes. These eyes are old and cold. They are hard as flint and twice as sharp. The wolf's eyes were curious and hungry, golden as the dawn. These eyes are filled with hate, a blood moon on the horizon, waiting to drink its fill.

  
  


“What a young thing,” he says, finally, and his voice grates like gravel against her ears out of a mouth that does not smile. “To be wandering in these woods.”

  
  


He is leaned back on his haunches, like she had imagined the wolf would be, and he is watching her with a detached interest. When she doesn’t answer right away, he rises in one fluid movement and drifts over to the wolf.

  
  


Now Rey can see the wolf. The man’s broad frame had hidden it from her.

  
  


It is the wolf's body, lifeless, a blade arching in a single silver crescent from its back, at home between the notches of its spine.

  
  


The man pulls the blade by its hilt from the beast’s still-warm flesh. Steam rises from its hide, and the blade squelches from the wolf’s meat as it is pulled out. Blood bubbles and begins to flow from the hole in the wolf, and the man quickly presses a bundle of fabric against the mortal wound, stemming the flow.

  
  


Then he turns to her, brandishing his sword. The glinting blade is covered in black blood that drops in thick rivulets into the thirsty earth beneath his feet.

Rey swallows hard. She can feel her heart hammering against the inside of her ribs and suddenly the wolf, along with her bruised and battered body, is the least of her worries. Her eyes cannot seem to leave the sword wrapped in his hands.

  
  


His hands, with each pale finger tipped in a dark gauntlet, sharp as razors. She thinks he could rend her throat from her body with one swoop of his arm.

  
  


“Thanks for, um,” She gestures beyond him, towards the motionless behemoth lying among brambles. “You know… that.” She says at last, a frail whisper from her dry mouth. It is all she can think to say.

  
  


A shiver has wound its way into her bones. She can’t tell if it is the sudden spike in the cold, or the fear finally touching her heart like poison. 

  
  


The man’s back goes rigid, shoulders set like steel. Rey can see him seeing her as though for the first time, as though he’d not really seen her at all before.

  
  


“You thank me?” With two impossibly large steps, he closes the distance between them. Up close, the scent of blood clings to him, a perfume of rot that fills her nose and turns her stomach.

  
  


She notices, dimly, that all the rain from before has turned to snow.

  
  


It falls between the tree branches in small, lazy tufts, dripping cold into her hair, settling onto her thin jacket. Her arms wrap around herself reflexively, rubbing at her skin as the fresh frigid air wakes her from a dream, a dying dream, a nightmare on her heels.

  
  


Rey nods and swallows again, trying to banish the dryness from her throat. “The wolf, it was coming for me. You killed it just before it – ” 

  
  


The man comes alive, one moment statue-still, the next a bolt of lightning. He drags her up, and her words turn to stammering nonsense on her tongue. Her legs scrabble at the ground, but he has her firmly by the shoulders and will not let go. She can feel his gauntlets digging into her flesh, sharp as she had imagined the wolf’s claws would be.

  
  


“Did you think that I killed the beast for you?” He says, upper lip curling in disgust.

  
  


“Please.” It is little more than a rasp from her mouth.

  
  


“Please? Tch.” He says, and cocks his head to one side, considering. “These are the fancies of children. Such things do not live in this place.” 

  
  


Then the man lets go of her just as suddenly as he had seized her. She drops, finding that her legs have lost their ability to hold her weight, and sinks to her knees before him. Her shaking hands grope in the snow, the snow that has come from nowhere at all. How could it be snowing? It’s the middle of spring. It’s the middle of spring, and there had only been a little chill in the air. Now it is so cold that she can see her breath clouding out in front of her, and her hands and knees freeze to the marrow where they are dug into ice.

  
  


The man turns from her and beckons towards the wolf with his iron-tipped fingers.

  
  


At first she had thought they must be gauntlets, sharpened and worn over his fingers, another weapon. But now she blinks, as though breaking through a fog, and sees them for what they really are – nails like jagged black daggers that jut from his fingers. Claws, like that of a beast.

  
  


Rey is beginning to believe that this is not a normal man, not a normal wolf, not a normal wood. 

  
  


There are stories she has heard. Stories from her mother and her aunt, and their mother before; stories where a child is spirited away to a frightful place that they do not know, inhabited with a cold folk unlike any other kind of people.

  
  


Her hands curl into the snow and she forces herself to stand. Her fear rolls off of her in waves. She cannot banish the trembling from her body.

  
  


The women in her family often spoke in hushed voices of the curse on their blood. The curse of the fair folk, the one that meant that the life of their women would be a stunted, miserable thing. But they were never meant to steal you away. Indeed, the fae never took one of their women.

  
  


The man clicks his tongue. “I had been following him for a long time, but nothing has ever made him sit so still as when he saw you.” He looks back at her, away from the wolf, and his eyes bore down into her as though he is trying to see whatever it is that the wolf had seen before it died.

  
  


“It tried to kill me.” Rey says, her heart still thrumming bird wings against her rib cage. She holds herself by the arms and shudders.

  
  


The snow is quickly making a thick blanket of white atop the ground, and while the man before her wears a black fur cloak, Rey only has a flimsy rain coat to keep her warm.

  
  


“He gave you pause first. He gave you time to run.”

  
  


Rey did not know what to say to that. She hadn’t run. She had been paralyzed with fear, yes, but also mesmerized by the monster’s beauty. And now he was dead.

  
  


It would have been him or her, she knew that. But as the snow melts in Rey’s hair and slips down her ears, she can’t help but think it should have been her lying there with empty eyes and a silent heart.

  
  


“Don’t look so sad, girl,” The man says with a softness that seems unnatural with his sharp face. “Someday death will come for you too.”

  
  


The man bends to the wolf. His hair is long, the color of a moonless night, and moves with him. With an unnatural ease, he hoists the giant wolf between his arms and rests it upon his shoulders. He strides past Rey, paying attention neither to the steam rising off of the dead animal’s hide, nor the dark blood that has collected in the cloth that he had packed into its wound.

  
  


“Follow me.” He says, with hardly a glance over his shoulder back at her.

  
  


“Um, go where now?” She hesitates. “I should be getting back home." She says, then adds uncertainly. "My aunt will be looking for me.”

  
  


Rey turns to point back to where she had come from, and quite suddenly, realizes that she does not know where she is.

  
  


She had thought she’d tumbled down a hill or a slope, or even a cliff, but if the trees hide such a thing, she can not find it. She spins around and around, searching the tall oaks and tangled firs, but there has only ever been the trees, only will ever be the snow.

  
  


She is struck dumb and beside herself. She does not know where she is or how she came to be here. “I’m lost.” She says quietly, in despair, to herself.

  
  


“Yes,” He agrees. “What else would you be?”

  
  


He strides forward and Rey scrambles after him. “Wait, please.” She says.

  
  


She does not want to place her trust in him, a wild and unnatural creature, but it is either beg after him or stay here and succumb to what elements this place has in store for her. She reasons, at least, that if this man wanted her dead, she already would be.

  
  


The man pauses and looks back at her, peering at her with those ancient eyes above the grey wolf fur. He says nothing, soft mouth set in a line below his long nose and sharp cheekbones. 

  
  


Rey takes a breath, steadies herself to banish the fear from her voice and to force some steel into her spine.

  
  


She tries to smile at him, though it must look more like she is about to break into a sob, and holds out a trembling hand to him in peace offering. “What’s your name?”

  
  


The man scowls and turns his back on her, continuing to stomp his way through the frost and the trees. She does not know what else hides in this wood. Her mind conjures images of snarling fangs and claws, rising hackles in the frozen air.

  
  


Rey has no choice but to stumble after him. She has none of his grace and nearly trips to her knees with every other step she takes. 

  
  


She doesn’t think he will answer her until suddenly he sighs and begins to speak with derision, his voice like mist between the trees. “Are you bold or stupid to ask such a thing? I cannot decide.”

  
  


As terrified and shivering as Rey is, the image of herself breaking his pompous nose still manages to flash in her mind. The only one who can call her stupid is herself.

  
  


“I do not have a name of my own to give, but you may call me Kylo Ren, as the others do.”

  
  


This sounds enough like a name to Rey, and if she were in a better mood and hadn’t nearly been killed several times over only a short few moments ago, she might say so. As it stands, she only twists her mouth wryly.

  
  


“I’m Rey.” She says, yet another olive branch.

  
  


He rounds on her so sharply that she nearly stumbles straight into his chest, and she is forced to twist her legs over one another to hold her footing.

  
  


“Are you so foolish as to surrender your own name so easily?” He growls. “Names are _power_ , do _not_ forget. The others surely won’t, and such a mistake would cost you more than your pathetic life.”

  
  


For a moment, Rey forgets to be afraid and the image of her throttling him with her small fists again rises unbidden in her mind’s eye. She bares her teeth, then remembers herself and the predicament she has found herself in. Kylo gives her his back and stomps on into the trees.

  
  


She’s following him again, shivering as the snow lands on her raincoat. She flips her hood back up and it gives her a little spare warmth, but not much, and she’s not sure how long she will last out here without proper clothing. Soon she is tracking her galoshes through layers of snow, leaving a trail of deep footprints behind her. 

  
  


They come up to a clearing in the trees that is is full of gently falling white flakes, and long dead grass that is covered in frost. There is an otherness in the air, a feeling that vibrates like static electricity between the snowdrops. A feeling like magic.

  
  


Rey inhales the chilled air and feels the otherness swell within her lungs, that lightning, that magic, breathing her to a life she did not know she had. She shivers and it isn’t from the cold or the terror, it is from the part of her that sings back into the wind and says this is what being home feels like.

  
  


In the center of the clearing, an ivory animal stands still as stone, save for the steam rising from its nostrils. The animal is the size of a horse but its hair is long and its face is thin with wide, moist eyes like a doe’s.

  
  


When they come near it, the animal does not flee. It flicks its ears forward and Kylo strokes its long snout before placing the wolf across its back with a care that Rey did not know he had. The wolf hangs down from either side of the animal, and though it would weigh down any normal horse, this animal stands proudly without bowing.

  
  


“Where are we, Kylo?” Not anywhere near her aunt’s little cottage in southern Virginia, she answers her own question internally. She’d wanted something to keep her mind off of her parents, and now she’d gotten it.

  
  


“We are in the lands of the winter court.” He says this simply, as though it should be obvious.

  
  


Rey pinches the bridge of her nose and squeezes her eyes shut to keep from lashing out. “Uh, you know, I’m sorry, but what does that mean exactly?” She forces through her teeth.

  
  


He frowns down at her and seems to realize all at once that she is shaking in the cold. She would not guess it before it happens, but he pulls off his black fur cloak and drapes it around her shoulders.

  
  


It had been large on him and is even larger on her, the hem of it disappearing into the icy grass and pooling at her feet. Then he leans down, leveling his face with her own. He raises his hand and she flinches automatically.

He peers at her and waits until he can see the green of her eyes, and then touches her face with the palm of his hand instead of his claws. His hand is pale against the tan of her cheek, and soft as he pulls it down to her jaw and stretches it along her neck.

  
  


Rey’s heart again beats hard within her chest and she sucks in the swirling magic in the air and looks away from him, flushing red from her neck to her cheeks with fear and apprehension, and his proximity to her, touching her with care as though she was a precious object and not a freezing, battered girl lost in a lost wood.

  
  


He watches her for another long moment, feeling her rapid pulse jump beneath her throat, before he drops his hand and straightens, “You have old blood.” He says. “Your kin failed you in keeping it secret.”

  
  


Rey opens her mouth, to say that she doesn’t have old blood, that she has cursed blood. To say that he has not answered her question at all, and that she still has no idea what he’s talking about, but he holds a single hand towards her and her words die in her mouth.

  
  


“This is the land of fair folk, land of the lost and forgotten, home to the court of winter and the undying Queen. And girl, if you wish to have any hope of getting home, you will come with me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I decided to post this a day early because I'm weak. Thoughts? I love winter fae Kylo, he's my fave.


	3. with a faery, hand in hand

_This is the land of the fair folk._

Rey bites back at the bile rising in her throat, the pang of her sore ribs and her stinging flesh. 

_This is the land of the fair folk._

Kylo’s words roll in waves against the insides of her skull, it is all she can think, again and again.

Rey knows what the fair folk are. How can she not? After all, she had been raised by a mother who sang of them, whispered to by an aunt who cursed them, and told stories of ancestors who were sworn to have died by their cruel hands.

She thinks she can hear her mother’s song in her ear, even now, riding the wind as it billows around her.

_“Tis there the fairy-court is holden,_

_And there flow beor and ale so olden,_

_And there lie men in bonds enfolden_.

_Say, pluck the herb where hawthorns quiver,_

_And wish a wish that God may deliver,_

_If he come not now - he need come never,_

_For I shall be Queen of these Fairies for ever.”_

When she was young, her mother would hold her and croon the words, mournful and low so that her father could not hear them.

Whether her mother truly believed, Rey would never know. The women of her family were all that way, full of whimsy and loveliness and stories of fairies. The fair folk. They spoke of the magical creatures with reverence and fear, leaving bread crumbs in the corner of the house to appease them, keeping bits of iron stowed away in their pockets.

They swore all the women in their family died on Fridays. They swore they were cursed by the fair folk to madness and half lives.

Rey’s own grandmother did not live to see Rey grow out of childhood, but perhaps, Rey thinks, it is better that she hadn’t. It meant that Rey’s grandmother had not seen the aftermath of the fire, the smoke filling the sky like a cloud of locusts, and the wails of a dying woman lost in the blaze.

Rey rides on the white elk behind Kylo, the dead wolf tied down behind her. Even pressed up against his broad back, the wind still managed to slide its cold fingers through her curls, and it whips the furs off of her shoulders. Up close, the stench of blood and death, sickly sweet, clings to him. Beneath that though, she can almost smell something else. She dares lean a bit closer to him, and a thrill runs down her spine to catch the fragrance of fat pine boughs and smoldering wood, of wilderness and wandering.

Her breath fans in front of her, little puffs of warm steam against the frozen air. She stares openly at the back of his head, trying to make sense of his nonsense words. Old blood and the winter court and _fair folk_. 

Watching him, with his odd grace and strength, she can not stop herself from believing his words, spoken like a promise.

Rey has fallen past the veil into the land of dreams.

She had taken his hand, but how could she have refused it? Not when the alternative was staying behind in the wood, perishing from the cold or the beasts she yet had no name for, leaving behind only her bones buried in the ice where they would surely never again be seen.

Her fingers had shook as she placed them in his palm.

Rey huddles in his furs, atop his steed, with his promises in her ear, but cannot fight the suspicion rising like hackles on her skin. Rey doesn’t trust normal, boring humans, she certainly isn’t going to trust one of the folk. Trust leads to betrayal, she is sure of this, though of nothing else.

“Where are we going?” She asks for what may be the hundredth time, shouting to be heard over the wind.

“To the winter court.”

“I thought you said we were already _in_ the winter court.”

He shoots her a look over her shoulder, dark brow knitted. “I’ve already explained this. I had heard mortal memory is fallible, I had no idea it was the same length as a goldfish’s.” He drawls.

Rey’s hand twitches with how badly she wants to hit him. She forces herself to stay still, to make her voice patient. “And how will I get home?”

“Unless it’s just _your_ small human mind that can’t comprehend the words coming out of my mouth?”

“I want to hear you say it again.”

His lips quirk, sinful and plush. “Do you?”

Rey grits her teeth. Of all the annoying, arrogant creatures -

“The Queen of the winter court is the only one in this land with the power to cross the border into the human realm.” He says slowly, enunciating each word. “If you want to go to the backwater hovel you came from, you must go to her first.” Kylo looks away from her, directing his gaze back to the tundra, conversation over.

The Queen of the winter court.

Beneath the fur coat, Rey shivers.

As the cow gallops through the frozen air, the grass dies away, buried beneath layers of frost and snow. The further they travel, the more desolate the landscape grows.

Rey cannot imagine that the ruler of such a grim and barren place would be a kind one. In the distance, mountains begin to rise on the horizon below a half-faced moon. They are black and jagged against the star-studded blue velvet sky.

  
  


Steadfastly and earnest, the cow keeps her path, pushing forward in the direction of the mountains. She seems to know where she should go without needing direction from Kylo. Indeed, she wears no saddle and no reins. Her bare fur scrubs against the inside of Rey’s thighs, and despite the leggings she is wearing, she knows they will soon be raw.

Despite her discomfort, Rey holds on as tightly as she can. Her hands grip the cow beneath her legs. She does not dare touch Kylo, not of her own accord. The energy he emanates becomes more and more frenzied as they grow ever closer to the mountains.

It seems the land slides beneath them. Time drifts, slow as a stagnant river current, and they split it in half with their riding. Every gallop forward goes farther than it should. She does not understand it. It is incomprehensible.

This land is set in amber, they are the only things alive. It makes Rey’s eyes hurt as she watches, forming an ache beneath her brow. She resolves to clench her eyes shut but can’t manage to keep them closed for longer than a few minutes at a time.

She wants to see it. All of it.

When she looks behind her, the forest they had come from is gone. It never existed. There has only been snow in every direction and the mountains looming overhead and the stars sitting in the endless black sea above them.

The air begins to shift as they get closer to the mountains. The snow stops falling, and instead of trodding through soft white, the cow’s hooves slam onto a thick crust of rime-covered rock and shale. There is a path carved between the many mountains, and as they travel it, rock grows up around them on either side, wet and stark and shining black. The path leads them down, to the mouth of a valley, where a castle grows out of the ice.

Rey calls it a castle because she can think of no other way to describe it, though it feels as if the word falls short of truly describing the fortress that has materialized before them.

It is built of obsidian, of onyx, warped and spired so that the castle appears as antlers rising from the center of a great frozen lake. It is massive, looking as though it could house a city within its walls.

As they get closer, she can see that frost whorls over the stone, as though it is ivy or wisteria. It is beautiful. Rey has never seen a piece of architecture so beautiful, she scarcely believes it exists at all.

But then - there is a wrongness to it that she can smell without knowing why or where it comes from.

The stench of rot beneath perfume, like a decaying body that has been dressed up to look upon before a funeral. If she blinks, she thinks she can see huge chunks of the castle crashing through the frozen water below, but when she opens her eyes again, the fortress is whole.

Kylo’s spine seems to grow more and more rigid the closer they come to the winter court, his aura wild and tumultuous beneath his armor.

  
  


Rey thinks that if he wasn’t sitting on the elk, he would be pacing a hole into the ice.

The elk walks across the frozen lake with no trouble at all. She does not slip and the ice, unbelievably, does not crack. They come to the regal pair of doors that lead into the castle, and veer to the side.

Kylo dismounts easily and watches Rey with hooded eyes. She bites her lip, uncertain, and then detangles herself from the cow, dropping to the ground below with none of Kylo’s grace.

The cold from the rime under the soles of her feet soaks through the thin, rubber layer of her boots almost at once, and she fights to keep from shaking. Rey is stiff in ways she has never been before, her legs aching and quivering from the strength required to keep herself on the cow for so long.

Kylo takes a step toward her and without meaning to, Rey flinches. 

A scowl forms across his lips, something like hurt in his eyes - not hurt, Rey corrects herself. It must have been something else, disdain perhaps. She does not believe that a creature like Kylo Ren would be so easily bruised by someone so small as her.

He reaches for her, he has to bend down to reach her shoulders, and his fingers crook around the edges of the fur cloak, pulling it taut across her back. He leans close to her and his breath does not fog in front of him, as though it is as cold as the air itself. It smells like chicory, and Rey is not convinced this is a bad thing.

His dark hair curls around his pale face, giving him the appearance of youth that Rey is not sure he has. His mouth is a soft line and his brow is scrunched together above his dead eyes. “This place - ” He hesitates, staring past her into the white. “You must tread carefully here, girl, there are things behind these doors that long only for misery and pain.”

Then why bring me here? Rey wants to ask, but she already knows that he will only say what he has said before. That they are there to see the winter queen. That she is the only one who can get Rey home again. “Why are you warning me? Why does it matter to you?” She instead demands with a heat she did not know she possessed before the words had fallen from her lips. 

Kylo straightens and looks away from her. If she didn’t know better, she would say that he is abashed. She remembers his eyes from the wood, full of cold fire. The hate that lived within him did not seem to leave room for playing babysitter to a frail human girl, yet here she is.

He pointedly ignores her questions and instead beckons her to follow him towards a tall wooden door. It is plain, with none of the splendor of the double doors that they had passed by.

Kylo pulls it open and ushers her inside, where they are greeted by a set of stairs. They look as though they are made of unvarnished pine, and they lead down into a room with stone walls. Moss and mushrooms creep along the rock, dull slate on darker grey. Rey follows him down the stairs, stepping carefully to avoid the holes eaten into the steps.

The room that the stairs open into is dark and dank, with the scent of musty sitting water, like that of a cave. When Rey’s eyes adjust, she sees she is in something that appears much like a wine cellar, with racks carved from raw scarlet gemstone, on which are perched hundreds of glass bottles.

The bottles shine in various colors, some half-filled and others close to empty, though others still have not been touched at all. The few which have not been open are stoppered off and clung to with white wax round their glass necks. None of them are labelled, and she briefly wonders how one might choose between them all without a way to discern one bottle from another.

Kylo must grow tired of her gawking, as he pulls lightly on her elbow to a door beside them, leading out of the little room.

Rey takes a step and nearly trips to her knees on the edge of a threadbare carpet that curls along all of its edges. It shows a vision of the sun with the face of woman, the rays of light rolling off of her as a lion’s mane. Rey grumbles under her breath and walks carefully around the muted yellows and dull oranges, her furs trailing melting frost behind her.

Kylo reaches a hand to the door, but before he can turn the latch and pull the handle, it is already opening.

For a moment, Rey thinks this is some magic he must be using. The fair folk could do magic couldn’t they? She hadn’t seen any yet, not any straightforward magic at least, because it did not escape her that there was magic ground into the bones of this place, running through its very marrow. She feels it with every draw of her breath.

But then there is a person in the doorway. He strides into the room, brushing past Kylo like he is not even be there. He closes the door firmly behind himself and takes in the pair before him, grinning something wicked, pointed teeth peeking from between plump pink lips.

“Oh, Ren,” He says. “Bringing strays in from the cold again?” His voice is lilting, a spoken song. His orange hair hangs in front of his eyes, all forget-me-not blue save for the black cats-eye slits in the center of each one. His face is ashen and angular. He is exceptionally beautiful, in the cold way of painted porcelain dolls or blown glass figurines, but the air around him is a storm.

  
  


Again?

The stranger is small and lithe and dressed in a short coat with chunks of raw quartz sewn into blue velvet, a living starscape above black riding pants and boots that shine like a beetle’s back. Rey had thought Kylo to be gifted with an inhuman grace, but compared to this man, he is ungainly, with his lumbering stature and too-long limbs.

The two fae are opposites, mirrored. Kylo Ren, all dressed in black, towers over the both of them. With two steps, he angles himself between Rey and the stranger.

“She is not for you.” Kylo says, with a quiet menace in his voice that chases the cold back into Rey beneath her furs, but which seems to have no effect on the man before them. He can hardly be bothered to raise even one red brow at the unspoken threat.

“Come now, you’ve had your fun. Surely you wouldn’t deny me the same?”

Fun? A feeling like fear is digging its canines into Rey’s skin.

“Hux - ”

“And what would our beloved Queen have to say?”

“That you can go out and find your own toys.” Kylo growls.

Hux rolls his eyes. “Let me have a look at it.” He smiles at Rey, and for a moment only it is an awful thing, an open, rotting wound carved into his face.

The Hux holds one hand forward, mischief rolling over him in clouds. As his fingers unfurl, so too does a wind that burns like ice against Rey’s skin.

The current loops itself in vines around her body, again and again. She looks down, a yell blooming from her lips, and sees nothing at all. The chains are as invisible as the air itself and pulled tight across the expanse of her body.

And then it begins to spin her.

The magic nips at her feet and twirls her legs beneath the furs, as though she is a ballerina trapped in a snowglobe.

Rey’s hackles raise and she cries out, even as her arms pull from her sides against her will. She spins again and fights it, feels her fury rising hot from the pit of her belly.

She tells her legs to still, for her arms to come back to her, screams inside her head that she will not be controlled - and then the chill around her body warms, as though it is losing the battle against Rey’s ire.

Her feet tangle against one another and, unceremoniously, she loses her balance and falls to the ground.

Or she would have.

Kylo catches her easily with one arm, righting her. The magic forcing her to dance is gone as quickly as it had come, dispelled back into the ether by its creator.

Kylo releases her quickly then takes a step towards the ginger fae, a snarl splitting his face in two. Hux slides to the other side of the room without trouble. He looks quite entertained with himself.

“She’s not for you either.” Hux says this like a reminder, like an omen. “You may as well let some of us have a game before – ”

“Get out.” Kylo says. His body has changed. Not in any singular way that Rey can name, but it is almost as though he feels a sliver of her own fear inside himself.

He goes still as iron, silent as a hunter, one clawed hand running along the hilt of his blade, the other curled towards Hux like it longs to be around his throat. The hatred in his eyes glows from the flames inside his ribs, licking at his insides and filling his lungs with an oily smoke that leaks, dove gray, from his scarlet tongue.

Hux looks straight at Rey with his odd feline eyes, the pupils gone to paper thin slices of black. “Mark this: you need not ally yourself with the court beast.” He says, and then throws a pointed glance at Kylo. “You would do well to stay far away from the likes of him.”

“Begone!” Kylo roars this time and Rey swears she can feel the echo of his voice tremble within the very walls themselves. He raises his curved blade, and that must do it, because Hux disappears all at once. Just like that, gone, in the span of a single breath.

The last part of him to go are his pointed teeth below his mischievous smile, each one popping like pearlescent buds into nothingness, a cheshire cat come to life.

Rey pulls a shuddering inhale, shaking from her shoulders to the tips of her frozen fingers. She tries to sort out the events that just happened, each one toppling over the other in her mind until they are hopelessly tangled, a puzzle she will never put together.

Her body had not been her own, but her mind had been there, locked within.

She shakes her head as if to banish the memory of it to the far reaches of herself. This is magic. This is its power, and the power it lends to its user. This is what magic feels like when it is used against someone. She swallows the lump in her throat she hadn’t known was there. It feels like she can never get away from all of that cold, as though the ice is a part of her now.

Something runs down Rey’s arm and she jumps, ready to bolt, before she sees that it is only Kylo, who pulls his hand away as though she were made of embers instead of frost. There is still that anger on his face, but beneath that, an emotion that looks almost like anguish, curling up within the blue black welts below his eyes.

“What the fuck was that?” She asks, and her voice comes out smaller than she’d wished it would.

Kylo has his blade sheathed at his side again, but at the mention of the ginger fae, he clenches the hilt reflexively beneath his black coat. “Armitage Hux is a son of the king.”

“He’s a prince?” It did explain the entitlement.

  
  


“If he is a prince, I am a pixie.”

Rey peers up at him. “You are?”

  
“How foolish are you to believe even a jest?” Kylo sighs. “Hux has no more favor with the queen than even a lowly hunter. His rank is…” He pauses, tasting the words in his mouth before choosing the correct one. “Precarious, he knows this, and will not do anything to risk his position.”

Rey is loathe to pretend she can understand Fae court politics. She swallows, her mouth dry. “Can you promise me something?”

He looks down the bridge of his nose at her, taking in her words. 

“Please.” She adds

“Children’s fancies.” He scoffs.

“I’m serious.”

“A promise is a boon. It is not easily given” He says, and there is a roughness like gravel on his tongue. “It will be given to you only at the cost of a favor.”

She shoots him a suspicious glance. “What kind of favor?” He doesn’t seem like the type to ask for something grimy or awful, standing there uncertainly with his dusky hair making curlicues over his sharp cheekbones.

Then again, she’s known him for hardly a few hours; or what had felt like only a few hours anyway, who knew how time truly passed in this place. She reminds herself that she knows truly nothing about the man standing in front of her, and despite the good he has already done for her, his actual motives remain shrouded in mystery.

“A small favor of my own choosing, to be used whenever I see fit.”

Rey crosses her arms and looks him up and down, trying to discern any dark purpose in his words. His face does not betray him, it is placid beneath her gaze. Only the stance of his body shows his discomfort, how he longs to move from beneath her view. His shoulders are squared, spine made of steel.

She wants to ask him what a small favor means, exactly, but she doubts that she will get any real answers. So she sighs and nods her head. “Fine.” She says. “And in return, you will never do anything like _that_ to me.” She gestures towards herself. “You’ll never use magic on me.” A small favor in exchange for the promise of at least one magical creature keeping its powers away from her seems as fair a deal as she can imagine in this place.

“It is done then.”

Rey half expects him to pull his blade from his side and slice both of their palms open, then force them to handshake so that their blood can mingle. Some kind of ritual to seal the deal, but her word seems enough to him, and he opens the door that he’d meant to go through before Hux had interrupted them.

He beckons her to follow him and she does.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song that Rey's mother sings to her is called "Fairy Lullaby". The original version of the song is called "A Bhean Úd Thíos".
> 
> If anyone is curious, check out [A Bhean Úd Thíos](https://www.mamalisa.com/?t=es&p=5591&c=68) for a bit of history of the song, as well as the original Gaelic lyrics.


	4. cloud-pale eyelids, dream-dimmed eyes

Kylo pulls Rey into an empty hall. Walls of solid black stone rise around them, so high that Rey cannot see where they meet the ceiling, even when she cranes her neck so far back that it aches. They turn with the hall again and again, their boots making echoes on the cracked glass floor. It is a labyrinth and Rey’s arms spread wide in wonder. Kylo pretends not to notice the way that marvel tugs up on the corners of her lips.

  
  


They reach a tall door of dull gray timber, little ivory roots dig into the wood in slivers. Kylo steps inside of it, ducking his head back and forth as though he is looking for something. As though he expects there to be someone there, hidden away in the gloom.

  
  


After a moment, his shoulders sag and he drags his clawed fingers across the stone wall. It begins to glow, a soft radiance like warm candlelight pulsating from within the black rock. It grows until the room is entirely lit, and Rey and Kylo stand bathed in a corona of golden-white, their shadows dancing across the floor together.

  
  


Rey sucks in a breath, her eyes gone large with awe. She lets her own fingers pull over the wall, near where Kylo’s had been, and the light stutters. It winks in and out until Rey reluctantly pulls her hand away, cradling it in her other palm and feeling rather admonished that the magic light did not care for her.

  
  


“You may stay in these quarters for the time being.” Kylo says stiffly, his arm presenting the room to her. Rey’s gaze follows his gesture without her expressly given permission. 

  
  


In the center of the room is a bed, or at least, she thinks that it must be a bed. It is more of a haphazard pile of dark silk and velvet among a jumble of pillows, all spread out on a low pad that sits squarely in the center of an ornate rug. A tapestry of stars hangs above the trundle, so realistic that Rey thinks that if she touched one of the woven galaxies, it would blink out of existence.

  
  


There is a wooden table pushed against the far wall, covered in an expanse of books and fat, half-melted down ivory candles. The books are leather-bound, or sewn with suede, the pages yellowing inside of their ancient covers. Various unrecognizable maps are pinned above the books, among oil paintings and delicate charcoal sketches. A cream chaise lounges beside the table, the material embroidered with delicate white leaves and studded with brass buttons.

Rey’s fingers twitch at her sides, itching to rifle through the pages, to pour over the art, but instead she spins around to face Kylo. To her surprise, she finds that she has drifted past him, taking several unbidden steps into the room. “Stay.” She repeats, her voice so soft she almost doesn’t hear herself. “How long will I have to stay here?”

  
  


Kylo blinks long and slow, and Rey tries not to admire the stutter of his black lashes against his pale cheeks. He breathes in and pulls his palm to his chest. “The Queen has left the court... but I believe she will be back soon.” He speaks rough from his throat, as though he is in pain.

  
  


“How do you know that?”

  
  


How long had Kylo been stalking his prey in the ice? How many hours had he followed the wolf through the brush and between the skeleton trees? Yet Rey could see a kind of certainty on his face, that he _knew_ where the Queen was. As though he had seen it in his mind’s eye.

  
  
  


Kylo steps to the opposite side of the room and sinks down into the divan. It looks surprisingly soft, pillowing up around him. He gestures to the spot beside him, indicating for her to sit next to him.

  
  


Rey shakes her head, indignant, with a look on her face like she’s just swallowed a lemon whole.

  
  


His shoulders hike up then down. Rey can’t tell from where she stands if he is shrugging or sighing. Then his fingers go to the shirt beneath his cloak and began undoing the bone buttons there.

  
  


Rey freezes, her mouth popping open. “What are you doing?” To her horror, it comes out as little more than a whisper.

  
  


He is silent, his fingers traveling further and further down his torso.

  
  


Her face flushes red, betraying her. He is scaring her. Despite herself, she scoops at what is left of her fraying nerves. “What are you doing? Stop that!” She yells, the words coming out high-pitched and screechy. “Stop that right now, no one wants to see that!”

  
  


“I’m answering your question.” He drawls, eyebrows pressed together in derision. “See?” He bares his chest to her, and Rey adamantly looks away. He doesn’t seem to mind that she won’t look at him. “This is how I - how we all know - when she is away. The mark grows dark as a bruise. It aches when she is gone.”

  
  


Rey gnaws on her lower lip, cursing herself and then her insatiable curiosity for good measure. She sneaks a glance down at Kylo, intending to be quick about it.

  
  


And is as shocked as she is disgusted by what she sees there. She finds that she cannot tear her eyes away.

  
  


His broad chest is a myriad of black and purple. The center of it is as the skin of old fruit, turned spoiled with rot. It sits right above his heart, in the rough shape of a dainty hand-print. The discoloration stretches from the fingers, running dark roots beneath his ashen skin, following the paths she imagines his veins trail throughout his body.

  
  


“You all have this?” She asks, hushed.

  
  


Kylo nods once, then sets about to buttoning his shirt up once again, until the collar presses closed against his pale throat.

  
  


Rey purses her lips. “Kylo that is - that’s not right. That’s awful.”

  
  


The image of the mark, rotten and _wrong_ , lives within her now. She cannot close her eyes without seeing it. The mark of the winter queen, the one she places on all of her subjects. It looks like the sort of thing from a nightmare, and Kylo had said it _ached_ when she was away. At the thought, Rey does not conjure the picture of a benevolent ruler, but of something twisted and cruel. Her subjects are also her slaves, trapped within the winter court.

  
  


What would happen if they went too far from her? Would the mark kill them? Rey has a sneaking suspicion that it would, but she can’t seem to make her mouth work to form the question that sits at the tip of her tongue.

  
  


“Why?” She says instead. “Why do you all allow her to do this, to… to hurt you like this? It’s not right.”

  
  


Kylo’s expression grows shadowed then shutters up before her. He stands suddenly and brushes past her, pulling his furs from her shoulders with such force that she nearly tumbles to the floor. She is struck by how naked she feels without the furs, clad in only her raincoat over leggings and a thin cotton sweater. He stands before the door with his back to her, fists clenched at his side. 

  
  
  
  


“Don’t pretend as though you know anything about this world.” He snarls and Rey flinches despite herself. “You, a halfbreed, taught nothing of your blood. You are not owed an explanation. You want to go home? Fine, go, but do not beg answers on something that you could never dream to comprehend.” With that, he strides out the door, slamming it shut behind him so hard, Rey can feel the tremble in the floor below the soles of her boots.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Rey had curled into a pile on the bed. She hadn’t shed her coat or her boots, it didn’t matter how filthy they were. Or how filthy she was for that matter. She had laid on top of the sheets and shut her eyes. She wasn’t surprised by the sudden exhaustion that had overtaken her after Kylo had left her alone, her whole body still felt bruised from the journey here. From falling through the veil in the first place.

  
  
  


It hadn’t been a full day since she’d left her aunt’s home, and yet it felt like weeks had past. She wondered if her aunt had begun to look after her. She could feel in her bones that time didn’t pass the same way here as it did at home, but she had no way of knowing what that meant. 

  
  
  


She had thought of the poem she’d read once, of fairies whisking a human away. He’d longed for home again, had ached for it, and so the fairy queen had given him a horse to ride to precious mortal realm. She’d warned him though, not to dismount the horse. The man hadn’t listened. Rey couldn’t remember why he hadn’t, but he hadn’t, and the moment his feet touched human ground again, he’d aged so quickly that he’d turned to dust.

  
  
  


Rey wondered if his fairy queen had felt anything when he died. If she’d regretted what she’d done.

  
  
  


From what little she’d seen of these creatures, she knew them to be capable of emotion, it was just that the emotions seemed limited to frivolous things like cunning and rage. She wondered if they were capable of sorrow or of love.

  
  
  


Rey had sighed and drifted off to sleep, a more restful one than she’d expected, and certainly deeper too since she did not wake until there is someone speaking into her ear, prodding her back.

  
  
  


“What a curious little thing.” The voice is feminine and lilting. “What are you doing here? You’ll catch your death.”

  
  
  


Rey doesn’t know how long the woman has been speaking, but as soon as she is aware of the words, she jolts up, eyes going wide and her heart slamming against her ribs.

  
  


A woman sits beside the bed, her legs crossed beneath a bright blue tunic, staring intensely at Rey.

  
  


“Who are you?” Rey demands. “How did you even get in here?” Kylo had locked the door behind himself, with magic or otherwise, Rey doesn’t know for sure which one but she suspects that it is the former. No matter how much she tugged on the door, it had refused to budge, so Rey had given up and thrown herself atop the mound of velvets and silks.

  
  
  


She finds herself irritated with Kylo to the point of distraction. How could he _happy_ to live like that? Well, she answers herself, it’s not like he actually seemed very happy at all. She wonders, before she can stop the thought from forming, how she might be able to change that.

  
  


The woman blinks her small black eyes. She is fine-boned, petite with skin the precise color and texture of an orange rind. It would would strike Rey as odd, but given the circumstances, well... “I could smell your despair through the walls, little bird.” The woman says it as though it is the most obvious thing in the world. As though Rey should have divined the answer herself. “It seems to me that you are rather far from home.” Then. “I am Maz”

  
  


This strikes Rey like a bolt of lightning. “Yes, _yes_ , I’m trying to get home. Can you help me?”

  
  


The woman tilts her head, then smiles as though she is sharing a secret. One of her hands disappears into the bell sleeve of her other arm. She roots around for a moment or so before presenting Rey with a flaky plum-sized ball of bread, the outside toasted to gold and slick with butter. She shoves it directly under Rey’s nose. It smells sweet, like salted caramel or rose water. Somehow both at one time, and something different altogether.

  
  


Rey finds her mouth watering at the smell, and she shakes her head to rid it of the haze that the scent leaves in the forefront of her brain.

  
  


“You’re hungry. So eat. You will need it to be strong.”

  
  


Rey considers refusing. Are you supposed to eat fairy food? All she can think of is the story of Hades and Persephone. Of a plush pink mouth wrapping around ruby red pomegranate seeds, popping them between flat white teeth. Persephone, with flowers in her hair and the sun living in her skin, trapped beneath the earth with only the souls of the dead to keep her company.

  
  


Rey can’t deny that she is hungry, and she doesn’t know when she will get the chance to eat again.

  
  


She could doom herself with one bite.

  
  


And all at once, she is too tired to care very much at all.

  
  


Rey holds the pastry in one hand and tentatively raises it to her mouth. She drags a look at the strange, wizened woman and hesitates. Maz’s little eyes are encouraging and she nods as if to say go ahead dear, and so Rey takes a bite, if only so the woman will be mollified.

  
  


But then, it tastes _so_ good.

  
  


The loaf is warm, impossibly so within all the cold of this place. Steam rises from the break in the crust that Rey made. It is as delicious as it smells, all cloves and honey, burned sugar and butter. Rey scarfs it down quickly, and she is sorry when it is gone. It leaves a weight in her stomach that she is thankful for, the raw ache of her hunger banished by sweet fairy bread.

  
  


Rey is still sprawled in the center of the low bed, and when Maz reaches out to her, Rey does not flinch away. There is a softness to this woman, despite her oddness, and so when she pulls Rey from the bed and bids her follow to an alcove in the corner of the room, Rey does not so much fight back as she does allow herself to be led. Food always does make her so much more complacent.

  
  


The alcove opens up to a small room with glass mosaic walls, deep blue like the sea. Rey steps inside onto white marble threaded through with veins of dove grey. In the center of the room is a basin, sunk deep into the floor. It is filled with gently steaming water, atop which is a film of frothy bubbles licking at the gold edges of the tub.

  
  


Maz gestures toward the tub, and Rey frowns. “You’re telling me to take a bath.” She says flatly. “Do you have any idea what I’ve been through? All I want is to get dragged up to the Queen and have her wave her magic wand or _whatever_ so I can leave, I wouldn’t care if I was covered in horse shit while I did it.” Then she squeaks because she remembers this is likely one of the Queen’s people, and hides her pink face behind her hands. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”

  
  


Maz considers her. “ _She_ won’t take an ugly duckling under her wing, dear.” She says. “You must go to her as a swan or not at all.” Her tone brokers no argument, and she putters back out of the bathroom, leaving Rey to her own devices.

  
  


Rey sighs and drops her arms, because she does not have the fight in her for this. She does not want to inform the small woman that even bathed, Rey is still very much the ugly little duckling.

  
  


She peels the layers from her skin. First the scarlet rain coat, now covered in a layer of thick grime and torn in three places, then the rubber galoshes which are still wet on the inside where the snow had seeped in and then promptly melted, then her too-thin sweater and flimsy leggings. Rey stands there naked, turning to gooseflesh with the chill in the air and makes herself slip down into the water. Her body disappears beneath the foamy white, so thick that she is sure no one could tell even the shadow-shape of her from above.

  
  


Rey would rather be uncomfortable, it would be easier, but she can feel the knots in her back and limbs melting into the warmth of the pool. She crosses her legs beneath her on the white marble basin bottom, and her fingers slip along it as she seeks a grounding that will not come to her. She pours warm water into her hair from a silver pitcher perched on the edge of the tub. It trickles between her ears like a flood, so much rushing water that for a moment, she is suspended in time, an insect in amber.

  
  


Rey could be anywhere, she could be back home - not her aunt’s home, but _her_ home. She could be in the claw-footed ceramic tub in her bathroom with her parents’ voices carrying through the door as they bicker over what to make for dinner. Her mother will want roasted red peppers and pesto on fresh baked sunflower bread. Her father will want porkchops and gravy. They will compromise, Rey knows, after so many years together that is what they do best.

  
  


But then - she remembers, that would only be if her mother was having a good day. And her good days had become fewer and farther between. Towards the end, Rey’s mother had withdrawn into herself, sleeping her days away, refusing food and drink, her husband pacing holes in the carpet and pulling at his hair. Rey would be gone all day so she didn’t have to think of it.

  
  


Her mother doesn’t have any days anymore, good or bad.

  
  


Rey grapples for purchase along the rim of the tub. She feels breathless and pours more water into her hair to wash away the memory of her mother with the dirt on her scalp. There is a line of bottles along the basin, each one filled to the top with a thick syrup of fragrance. The oils coil thick ropes of bergamot, of rosemary, of something she can not quite name; flowery and warm, it tickles her nose.

  
  


Rey scrubs the oils into her skin, her hair. She scrubs long and hard, until her skin feels peeled raw, cracked open, until the ghosts of her past are duller around the edges. Then she rinses herself until the perfume of the oil is only a light scent clinging to her body. Rey stands, bubbles and water sloughing off her body like a sodden second skin. She shivers violently and jumps for a thin towel hanging just beyond her reach. Even with it, she is still chilled, as though there are chips of ice inside her now.

  
  


Maz must hear her sloshing, as she pokes her head into the doorway and beckons Rey to join her. When Rey obliges, the woman turns so that Rey can see her fully, along with the dress she cradles in her arms.

  
  


The gown is folded carefully, so that all Rey can see of it is that it is a lovely shade of cream. Maz hands the dress to Rey and Rey pulls it on easily. It does not catch or snag on her, instead like silk or water, it flows against her skin.

  
  


When Rey has it on, Maz helps her with the back of the dress, which is composed of a latticework of pale pink ribbons. Maz yanks them tight and then ties them even tighter, so that Rey’s waist is waspish but also so that she can scarcely breathe. Then Maz pulls Rey to the front front of a silver glass framed in hammered pearls.

  
  


The dress dips down rather lower than Rey would perhaps have chosen for herself, as it’s not exactly flattering on someone who is less than endowed, like herself. She also can’t see how such a fashion will fit in at a court of winter. 

  
  


It is long sleeved and sheer, so that from afar her chest and arms looked be covered in a spray of flowers and curlicue vines. The small purple buds trail just over her breasts, revealing much of her chest, and plummet to the center of her waist, where a flaxen skirt pours over her hips, and drips pools of silk along the marble. What steals her eye more than anything though, is her skin, which glows a dusky gold. It seems to glimmer beneath the turn of the light.

  
  


Maz weaves raw gems into Rey’s hair, a crown of emeralds, of tigers’ eye, of rose quartz. 

  
  


Rey holds her hands out before her in an awe that only just overpowers the roiling fear that has begun churning inside of her gut. She can’t still her fingers enough to leech the tremble from her bones.

  
  


Maz grasps her hands fully, and drags her away from the mirror. She is smiling, pleased with herself, pleased with Rey.

  
  


Rey’s mouth remains downturned, a troubled look for her troubled mind. It is just fairy magic, it had to be, impish tricks from the water and the oils that had soaked into her flesh. They’d created a glimmer that hadn’t yet washed away, though she thinks it will likely fade with time. At least, Rey’s heart hurts and she hopes it will. It seems very silly, then, in a palace made of ice and dressed in fairy finery, but Rey knows she cannot go home with glowing skin.

  
  


“You are a legend.” The woman promises.

  
  


Rey can only stare at her feeling a bit like she is being tricked in some way.

  
  


“When they ask you who made you so beautiful, you must tell them it was old Maz.” The woman, Maz, says and she looks so gleeful, so proud, that Rey cannot deny her a small smile in return.

  
  
  


Spring, Rey realizes all at once, the oils that she had rubbed into her flesh and her hair, they had made her smell like spring.

  
  


Maz walks her to the door. Rey’s hand hovers over the golden knob, a tremor running just through her fingers.

  
  


“Why did you do all of this?” The food and the bath and playing dress up. The folk weren’t supposed to be kind. They didn’t do things for others, only for themselves. If they seemed to be helping you, it was really only at the expense of your soul, a cruel joke where they were the only ones left laughing in the end.

  
  


But when Maz turns her eyes on Rey, it feels as though those eyes, black as a new moon, black as a beetle’s back, black as freezing, have looked into her and pulled out her heart. It is pulsing red between them. Then Maz smiles, low and sly, like a secret, and the moment is gone. It rushes away from them, gone on the wind.

"You need only ask, dear," Maz says. "And you asked, remember?"

Rey blinks and knows she is on the precipice of something, but it dances from her grasp, a silver-scaled fish glinting back into the depths of the ocean of her memory. She follows Maz down the hall, much as she had followed Kylo, their figures dancing into one on the starless black sky of the cracked glass path.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm SO sorry for the late update. I like to do a bit of editing before I post the chapter and I've had pneumonia so I've just been lethargic as anything.
> 
> This particular chapter needed alot of editing imo, I was not satisfied with it.
> 
> In other news, Maz screams 'fairy godmother who doesn't take your shit' to me and so that's her role in this story.
> 
> You guys get to meet the winter queen next chapter so hold on to your seatbelts.
> 
> If anyone wants a visual on Rey's dress, I based it on this [Floral Dress](https://66.media.tumblr.com/1964b289944d8b964da1cc4cd8f27e40/tumblr_ok27kkbVcY1r12egho1_540.jpg)
> 
> As usual, comments/criticisms are welcome!


	5. the unlabouring brood of the skies

There is a woman made of bones, there is a woman made of dust.

She sings sweetly, she sings madly.

Her eyes are red and dead and she wears a crown, a crown of crystal spires, settled atop colorless hair and knotted ribbons.

She sips clotted pig’s blood from a golden chalice, it stains her teeth, froths at her mouth, collects in tear drops at her chin and trails footsteps down the column of her marble throat.

She watches them dance beneath her, backs bent in supplication and eyes turned to stars at her glory.

She watches them pinned in place by her light, her might, her moths and bees and cockroaches cut to stillness beneath the glass of time.

Her throne is made of corpses. She wears a perfume of rot.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Rey stares into the ballroom, her eyes gone wonder-wide, spinning like marbles in her head.

  
  


She crosses the threshold, steps into a ring of gold, into the living dream and becomes a dream-thing herself, illusory around the edges, she is made of smoke.

  
  


The tall, dark wood doors slide silently shut behind her, and she doesn’t even notice.

  
  


The reverie before her is nothing she’s ever seen before. It is nothing, it can’t be, because it isn’t real. Everything else she has seen so far becomes a fog in the recesses of her mind. This is it, this all there ever was, wild and _alive_.

  
  


The people before her are not really people at all.

  
  


Ballerinas twirl with flowers dripping velvet down their ears. Singers carry lutes of smooth mahogany that sprout feathery purple buds, or fifes made of raw crystal, or lyres with spider silk string. Minglers stand on the outskirts, fingering cakes dusted in silver, lifting goblets to their lips, tittering around mouthfuls of wine and sweets. Many of them have their faces painted in glimmer. Some wear feathered masks that cover all but their red lips, softly tilted upwards and looking wet as with blood.

  
  


These figures turn like clockwork below a ceiling made of ice. Hanging spires dangle far above their heads, large and sharp enough that if one were to become dislodged, it could easily pierce through flesh and bone.

  
  


Candles in miniature, dripping wax like rain drops, make stars in the air. One drops low enough that Rey is able to touch it with the tip of her index finger and as she does, it spins away from her in figure-eights.

  
  


Rey wonders if Kylo is here, then thinks better of it. The last thing she’d seen of him had been his cold black eyes, a fire in them that so looked like hatred that it turns her stomach even now. He had looked as though he hated her. She doesn’t think she wants to see him again, not after that. He’d told her how to get home. She doesn’t need him anymore.

  
  


(She doesn’t feel a pang strike through her heart when she imagines leaving him here alone. She doesn’t, it’s just the cold creeping between her ribs.)

  
  


She knows how to get home. Rey says it to herself again and again, not an anthem but a promise.

  
  


And she is sure she knows where the queen is. A throne sits across the ballroom, a mountain carved of cassiterite, growing cirrus trails of hoar across it like ivy. Rey is far enough from the throne that from where she stands, she cannot make out the face of the queen, only that she is very pale and dressed all in white, a frozen ghost on her frozen chair.

The queen has returned, and her people celebrate that she has come home to them.

  
  


Rey’s first thought is to push her way through the party, like she had back home in a packed club when she needed to get to the bathroom. So that’s what she does, and it works for a few moments, but the crowd becomes thicker and rowdier.

  
  


There is a man with curling goat’s horns and he is pressing his mouth against a woman’s neck and when he bites down hard enough to draw blood, she lets out a silent scream that could be a moan. It’s ruining the woman’s gossamer dress, but her eyes are glazed and she does not seem to care.

  
  


A cluster of men all dressed in green, their long faces dripping into wrinkles, puff from iridescent wrappers. The smoke they blow winds around them like snakeskin, glowing the gentle red of embers. Rey steps carefully around them, holding her nose so that she does not breathe in the smoke. It seems to make the other revelers dizzy when they drink it in, their eyes heavy-lidded with sleepy smiles painted on their faces. 

  
  


Several dancers, all rosy tangled limbs and delicious smiles and eyes black, black as night, shove against Rey roughly. She stumbles but does not fall. She lands against the chest of an impossibly tall man, his skin pale and his eyes sharp. He peers down at her, surprised for only a moment until his mouth twists into something wicked. He could have been beautiful if he was not so fearsome to behold. His red hair curls at his cheeks.

  
  


He holds her before himself like a prize he’d always been expecting to win.

  
  


He pulls her close, his claws digging into her back. She winces and jerks back, but he holds her pinned in place, dropping his nose to her neck and inhaling deeply. At the smell of her, she swears she can hear him purring, and she wrenches back once more.

  
  


“Hux,” Rey says, “Let me go, I -”

  
  


“How curious,” he says, his voice as much music as any of the tunes coming from the myriad of instruments around the room. “As dull to look at as any mortal, but then you do smell so sweet.” This time he buries his nose in her hair. Rey struggles against him but he is solid rock beneath the palms of her hands.

  
  


“Please.” Rey calls and it is lost in the music.

  
  


She startles when she feels another pair of hands wind their way down the small of her back. “What have you found, Hux?” A woman’s airy words reach Rey’s ears.

  
  


“A tempting morsel, so soft and alone here.”

  
  


“Do you not wonder that a mortal found there way here, to this place?” The woman levels her eyes with Rey’s, a stunning silver, shining like diamonds. She wrinkles one lip, marring her perfect face with disgust. “It is clearly owned already.” She turns on one heel, as if to disappear into the crowd of dancers, but Hux tsks loudly enough to stop her.

  
  


Hux scoffs. “I know where this one came from, another one of Kylo Ren’s.”

  
  


Another?

  
  


“And do you not wonder that there is no taste of his glamour upon her skin?” He pries Rey’s arm from her side and holds her pulsing wrist before him, as though bading the woman to try a bite and see for herself. “She is unclaimed.”

  
  


Another.

  
_"I said, let me go!"_ Rey jerks back with enough surprising force to jostle herself from his arms.

Rey’s face is on fire, burning bright scarlet from the boil in her blood flushing her freckled cheeks. She grits her teeth. Something inside her whispers that she cannot be _possessed_ , claimed or owned or otherwise. This anger, this rage, is scalding the insides of her veins. Quite suddenly it is very hard to breathe.

  
  


A hand settles on her shoulder, extinguishing her might from the outside in. She thinks, for a moment, that it must be Kylo, come to scold her for finding her way into this fete without him to protect her, and if her heart dips a bit when she realizes that it is not, she does not allow herself to dwell on it. She turns to him and looks up, indeed has to in order to meet his gaze.

  
  


A soft smile plays on his face, and his fingers dust the edge of shoulder where her arm begins, drifting down to the crook of her elbow, where he holds her there in a grip that is iron for one with such delicate hands.

  
  


“My dear, had you gotten lost in the festivities?” His breath, the scent of honeycombs in the sun, puffs against her skin, his lips close enough to taste, and his dark hair spinning new moon circles on her cheek. “I feel as though we’ve haven’t crossed paths in ages.”

  
  


Hux has the gall to snarl, a vitriol across his face that seems to pull his ashen skin closer to his bones, so that every bit of him goes sharp and ugly. “Don’t try to tell me that this mortal is _yours_ , I _saw_ Ren sneaking her in, the coward.”

  
  


“And just who did you think he was sneaking her in for?” The man says. “I’ve not been able to play in such a very long time.” He sighs so prettily that Rey’s heart begins to hurt for him.

  
  


“You expect me to believe - you _never_ lose track of yours, Poe, never.”

  
  


“The ones I like, certainly not,” Poe says coolly. “Though even unfavored, what is mine is mine and I’m not done playing yet.” He raises his other hand into the air, bidding him farewell before he can get another word in.

Hux goes even sharper, inhuman and unnatural, his cheeks cutting blades through the thin of his flesh. His lips so white and fine they practically do not exist. He looks like a knife given human form.

  
  


The woman pulls on him, her mouth opens but her words are dusted so low that Rey cannot make out what she is saying over the lilt of the music floating through the air. Whatever she says must leech the fight from him, as his skin goes soft as butter and he is beautiful once more. He gives an elaborate bow and links his arm with the woman, and together they melt into the crowd of revelers as though they never existed at all.

  
  


Rey immediately turns on the man, shaking him off of her arm like a gnat. His smile turns feral and she can see a pointed pearl duo peeking over the top of his plump pink lower lip. He tilts his neck towards her and breathes in, much the same way the Hux had. There is a soft sigh pressed against the edges of his throat and he eyes her, half-lidded. “You’re a curious thing, do you know that?”

  
  


Rey is sick to death of being called _curious_. She thinks she would give her right arm to never have to hear the word again. “This entire place is full of curiosities, I should blend right in.” She bites out.

  
  


“Then it speaks much of you, does it not, that you command the attention of so many in a place of so much?”

  
  


Poe turns his head and looks out into the ballroom, and for the first time, Rey sees the crowd with eyes that are no longer drunk on the splendor of a new world.

  
  


She is being watched, and when she watches back, they do not turn away.

  
  


They - _the fair folk_ \- are swaying, a many-headed beast with yen dripping from their wagging tongues and Rey feels their desire in her marrow. They want to suck her dry. They want to kiss at her flesh and drink the youth from her blood. They want to see the whites of her eyes go sickly yellow. They want to brush her hair brittle and grey. They want to burn her up with fever until there is nothing human inside of her anymore.

  
  


They want and they want and they want.

  
  


“Something is wrong with them.” Rey says. “What is _wrong_ with them?” She chokes on her words like she going to throw up. The acid in her stomach is burning at the bottom of her esophagus and she will throw up, she thinks she will, if she looks even one of them in the eyes again.

  
  


Poe shrugs, “They’re empty.” He says it as though that is the only explanation in all the world.

  
  


Rey’s mouth curls. She wants to ask _why_ they are empty but she suspects that it is just in their nature. These beings made of frost and magic, as eternal as stars and just as devoid of life.

  
  


“They want you.” He says and she shudders in disgust. He runs his fingers through her soft brown hair and he looks bemused, cooing softly and ignores her when she tries to swat him away. “Do you see?” He says.

  
  


Rey nods, “Yeah, I do.” She steels herself. “I don’t belong here.”

  
  


“No, of course you don’t, but that’s not what I was trying to show you.”

  
  


“Kylo said - ”

  
  


The man pulls away from her, a hand on his face and across his eyes in lament. “Please, my ears bleed at that brute’s name, don’t speak of him.” He says. “There are many more civilized folk here, and fate has brought you to one of them.”

  
  


Begrudgingly, she acquiesces. After all, Kylo may have killed the wolf before it could rip out her throat, but he’d also brought her to this terrifying, dead place and locked her in (what she could only presume was) his bedroom after storming away from her. He’d been incredibly rude in general on top of everything else, so she wasn’t particularly inclined to show him any loyalty.

  
  


“I was told,” she corrects herself. “That my way out of here is through an audience with your queen.”

  
  


“My queen?” He hums, tilting his head so that his black curls dance over his shoulder. “And what, pray tell, makes you think that she is my queen?”

  
  


Rey feels a spark go bright inside her chest and fights to stamp it down. These fair folk and their twisting words. He’d back her into a corner using nothing but her own tongue and then he’d stick her, watch her bleed out just to satisfy his curiosity at what was rushing through her veins. She is belatedly surprised that she is not dead already, because though Poe had not let her fall into the mouth of a cat-eyed beast, that did not mean that he would not consume her whole himself.

  
  


She smiles so that Poe can see all of her teeth. Not pointed like his, but just as good to chew with. “Do you live inside of these walls?”

  
  


He considers her. “At least until every star in the sky goes out.”

  
  


“And this is the winter Queen’s court?”

  
  


“Until the earth cracks in two, perhaps even then.”

  
  


“Then it sounds to me like she’s your Queen.”

  
  


Poe blinks slowly, long lashes brushing the tops of his blade-sharp cheekbones. He lets a breath out, looks as though he is coming out of a long, deep sleep. He taps his fingers against his chin. “For now, it would seem.” He says. “Why would I help you?”

  
  


“You already helped me once.”

  
  
  


“Well, I was very bored.” Then, he extends a hand to her. “I will take you to her, in exchange for a dance.”

  
  


“Will the dance end?”

  
  


He grins like poison. “Eventually.”

  
  


There is a story that her mother told her often, the story of a fairy who stole away a human woman and gave her a pair of shoes. The shoes made her dance, and she danced so long she could not eat, could not drink, could not sleep. And she did not stop dancing until she died, feet still trapped in those cursed shoes.

  
  


So no, Rey did not think she would be accepting a dance from one of the fae. Instead, another idea came to mind. She crosses her arms over the flowers lacing their way over her chest. “I will swear a single dance to you, but on my own terms.”

  
  


“Mortal terms, how quaint.”

  
  


She arches a single brow. “Do you want to hear them or not?”

  
  


Poe twirls a hand impatiently and huffs, as unregally as such a beautiful creature can manage.

  
  


“Poe,” she pauses, uncertain of how to continue for a moment, but he prods her on with a disdainful look. “I swear to you one dance on the eve of my return to the mortal realms, under a one-half moon, and when the sun begins to rise the dance will end.”

  
  


Poe snorts. “Is that it? You mortals are always so cautious, so strict, as though even the least of my kind could not undo your verbal bravado with a single tug of the knit.”

  
  


A very significant part of her is tempted to shove him into the crowd with both arms and see how much she could get him to topple into, or lift a glass of fairy wine and upend the entire thing in his face. She grips the sides of her arms so tightly that she can feel the skin near-splitting beneath her the white tips of her long nails.

  
  


_We have to be_ , she thinks desperately, _we have to be so careful because of the things in the dark_. The things in the dark that want. She bites her bottom lip and counts backwards from ten, and Poe does not seem to notice. He does not notice because time is nothing to him while it is everything to her.

  
  


_Eight, seven, six, five..._

  
  


“Do we have a deal?” She says, finally, in a voice gone rough as tree bark.

  
  


_Four, three, two…_

  
  


“Yes, I suppose we do.”

  
  


Rey extends an arm to him, and minds the one that feels as though she has bit through the layers of her skin with her own nails. He takes it and leads her into the crowd. The fair folk part for him like the sea. A split ocean of beautiful monsters dancing on black glass, singing their questions in hushed voices at the thing on his arm. She shrinks against Poe when a small woman with curling cotton candy hair and blood dripping from her eyes steps too close. There is a beating in Rey’s chest, a fluttering in the night that she recognizes as not fear but terror.

  
  


Then it is over, and Rey is before a throne, and her breath is coming in gasps and she can’t hold herself together. She is unweaving like a dandelion in the breeze. Poe shoves her down to the ground and she can’t find it in herself to resist. She is folded in on herself, nose skimming the dark stone and torso pressed up against her knees. She shakes wildly and notices that when she looks to her side, that Poe has prostrated himself in much the same manner.

  
  


There is a sound like bells and Poe raises himself up again in one fluid motion, as though he had never deigned to do something so undignifying as kneel before another person. After a few moments, when Rey is still on the ground, Poe pushs into her ribs with one steel-toed boot, and it is enough to make her jump to her feet, a squeak of protest falling from her lips.

  
  


Then Rey sees her, the Queen of the Winter Court.

  
  


The woman before her is no woman at all. She is a nightmare come alive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not so much Kylo in the last chapter or this one, but there is so so sooo much of him in the next one, I promise.
> 
> I debated long and hard about introducing Poe or Finn in this chapter. I LOVE Finn, but I feel like he would have tried to straight up fight Hux and I needed a character who would be willing to play the game a little more.
> 
> Side note: do you guys ship FinnPoe or FinnRose?
> 
> Let me know what you guys think! I love comments :)


	6. and they put out the star-light with the breath from their pale faces

Kylo sees her before she sees him. He watches her, the way the wolf had in the wood, with hungry, desperate eyes. He does not want to hurt her, but he will. He will.

  
  


Poe is at her side, his hand crooked in her elbow, and the monster inside of Kylo growls in his ear - but Kylo knows there is no monster inside of him, rather he is the monster, the beast in the wood. His sharp teeth are bared and he has a hand on the hilt of his blade. He could run the man down in one strike, just for touching her. For daring to touch what he had found in the snow.

  
  


He sees her there again, laid down in the frost with her soft brown hair curled around her face like a halo, little white clouds puffing from between her pink lips, and her cheeks flushed. There had been fear in her eyes and it had thrilled him, beast that he is, to imagine that the fear was also desire. Fear of him, desire for him.

  
  


He could have taken her there, in the cold, it would not have been hard. He could have held her hands above her head. He could have made her like it.

  
  


He is breathing hard and the Queen notices. “What is it we have here?” She asks, her voice like a song. Her eyes have followed his, to the girl draped in flowers wearing her own crown of gems.

  
  


Kylo frowns and dips his head so that his gaze falls away from Rey. “It is nothing.” 

  
  


The Queen lets one small hand touch his shoulder and he feels his ribs tighten, bruise against his lungs and heart like a fist. He gasps and drops to one knee, black hair falling over his pale cheeks. He hisses between his teeth, lips gone paper thin. The Queen waits until he is near shaking, then drops him. “Yes,” the Queen says. “It is.”

  
  


* * *

“Drop your eyes, mortal.”

  
  


The voice is menacing, nails on a chalkboard, a snarl that echoes from the icicle points hanging from the ceiling down to the ballroom fete.

  
  


Without her expressly given permission, Rey’s eyes find the spot on the floor where the throne of ice melts into the floor. There is the stench of iron, of decay. It is heady and sweet and Rey’s stomach churns from the smell. She can’t escape it. It is everywhere.

The smell of death.

  
  


Their Queen is not a Queen. Rey's one stolen glance had told her that. Their ruler is a dead thing, more bone and rot than fae and magic. Is this what it means to be eternal? In order to attain immortality, must you cede everything that makes you alive?

  
  


The Queen’s hair is colorless, long and straight beneath a stalactite crown. She wears a simple white shift that presses against her like a second skin. If given the chance, Rey is sure that she could count each and everyone of the Queen's bones beneath her dress. Though the Queen had eyes, they may as well have been empty sockets. They showed nothing, nothing at all.

  
  


Rey stares at the bottom of the corpse’s seat and swallows the bitter taste of bile climbing up her throat. The chair does not seem to fit the woman who sits upon it. It is silver spinning between ribbons of opal. It has its own roots, as a tree, and they sink into the ground. Each one seems to pulse at the center, a heartbeat. Rey does not dare to look up, but she imagines that the top of the throne must mirror the bottom where it meets the ceiling, high above them.

  
  


“What is it that you have brought me, dear?” The Queen says, and her voice has turned sickly sweet, a honey dripping poison.

  
  


Poe does another small bow and steps forward twice, two small steps closer to the dead thing. Rey is keeping count in her head and she cannot make it stop. “This is a mouse that your wretch brought inside, majesty.” He smiles. “It seems he tried to keep this little one hidden in his chambers, for what purpose I just _cannot_ imagine.”

  
  


Rey’s cheeks burn at the implication. So it had been Kylo’s bedroom after all. She had known that, somewhere inside of her. The room was too personal to have no one living in it and Kylo had proved to be a distrustful creature, he’d not let her stay with anyone else.

  
  


Still, Rey curls her lip at Poe for the suggestion that _something_ is going on between her and Kylo. She nearly denies it, but the Queen speaks first.

  
  


The Queen tutts. “Kylo Ren, is this true?”

  
  


She hears a rustling above her, it sounds like dry tinder being swallowed by a flame. Only then does she realize that Kylo is there too, has been perched in the corner of her eye this entire time. She can see the tips of his black boots as he stands beside the Queen, not as an equal but as a servant. She does not hear him respond, but he must indicate the truth of Poe's words as the queen tutts again.

  
  


“And what have I told you about bringing home mortals?” Another shuffle and though Rey cannot see him, she imagines that he appears admonished, as the Queen sighs loftily but without anger. “Well, my interest has been piqued. Why have you brought this creature before me when you could simply have used it to amuse yourself, as you have done so many times before?”

  
  


“I rather like this one.” Poe says.

  
  


“All the more reason for you to keep it.”

  
  


Poe rolls his eyes. “She wants to go _home_ , back behind the mortal veil.” He says. “I am many things, but I am not a thief. Your pet has informed her that you are the only one within our court with the power to give her what she wants.”

  
  


There is a black-hole in the room. An abyss between Rey and Poe and the Queen and Kylo. A silence, deafening. It is over in a moment, but Rey can still feel the remnants of it between the gaps in her ribs.

  
  


“So I am.” The Queen says.

  
  


Rey’s lips are pressed into a thin white line. She does not dare speak her piece, though the words press at the insides of her skull. She swears she will never tell another living soul what she has seen here. She begs that even her ghost will forget the way to this place, indeed has already forgotten. She cries to be returned to home, where the dead do not rule over the living.

  
  


“What will you give me for it, girl?”

  
  


For one stunned moment, Rey does not realize that she has been addressed. Then her brain begins to turn its gears. She could swear so many things. Her first born child, her very womb, all the tears she has left inside of her body, her left leg and her right arm, her ability to hear music or to see color.

  
  


Somehow Rey knows that none of these things would suffice for the Queen of the Winter Court. So instead she swallows to banish the dryness in her throat and she speaks the truth. “I have nothing to give you that you would find worth having.” 

  
  


The Queen laughs, a wet and clotted thing wheezing from between her lips. “Oh,” she says. “I most sincerely doubt that.”

  
  


And then there is a power, a force that encases Rey’s body and holds her taut in place. It is chains of frost curling around her arms, her legs, her torso. Slowly, her neck and chin are gathered upwards by the power, the magic. Her eyes scrabble to hold onto the ground but it burns and she finds that she must look up. She must look up or she will be scorched away from the inside out, she will become nothing but ash and will blow away in the wind, she will have never existed at all.

  
  


The woman sitting on the throne is nothing of what she was only moments before. There is a fullness to her cheeks, they are warm and pink. Her hair dusts her collarbones, the color of rust, and her eyes – oh, her eyes are a forest set between long red lashes. Her nose is long and straight, her jaw is set firm with a dimpled chin. She laughs and it is the sound of bells pealing between sweet painted lips. She is beautiful, but there is power in her beauty. She holds Rey’s gaze with iron in her brow.

  
  


It is only then that Rey sees the wolf, the giant fanged monster from the forest. Its body has been placed on a ledge above the Queen’s head, so that when she leans back, her crown of ice rubs against its grey fur. It has been sliced open from chest to stomach and its innards splayed across the top of the throne. Its blood rivers down the sides of the chair, staining the crystal pink. Kylo holds a glass of blood away from himself, towards the queen.

  
  


“You’re such a pretty thing now.” The Queen purrs and curls a tendril of magic around Rey’s throat. Rey flinches back, inhaling sharply at the feeling of frost on her neck. She feels a small brush of warmth come forth, like a fire at her spine, flowing over her collarbones, and the cold jerks back as though it feels the heat too, and does not like it very much at all. The Queen hums at that and all at once, the magic is gone.

  
  


Rey drops to the ground and sags on her feet, swaying gently with the buzzing in her brain. The magic, something whispers inside her, it is all the magic that is making her so dizzy, tipsy like she has taken too many shots of tequila.

  
  


Rey rubs her head and clenches her eyes so hard she sees stars, trying to banish the bees inside her brain back to where they came from. “Please don’t do that again.” She says weakly. Her words feel thick and slow on her tongue.

  
  


Was this how magic made everyone feel? Was this how it made her feel the first time, with Hux in the cellar? It had only been a few hours before but it felt like a million years ago, the time between then and now stretched thin as salt water taffy. Time works differently in this place, she reminds herself sternly, but she cannot shake the feeling of remembrance, the feeling of forgetting what she used to know.

  
  


There is a sharp, short intake of breath from the Queen’s side. Rey looks up in the direction the sound comes from and falls straight into Kylo’s eyes, sees the panic beneath his storm. He quickly looks to his queen and his mouth drops open. There is the beginning of a _plea_ on his lips but he seems to remind himself of what he had told Rey hours ago, forever ago, in that frozen field, because he presses his mouth into a line. He goes stone still and will not meet Rey’s eyes.

  
  


The Queen smiles, but Rey sees her hands go rigid on the sides of her throne, digging into it with her nails so hard that Rey thinks that the crystal will splinter like glass beneath her. “I’m touched that you’ve come to me with your aspirations, my dear, but surely you know that nothing is for free here and that _everyone_ has something to give.”

  
  


A shiver rolls down Rey’s spine. Yes, she’d even sworn a piece of herself to Poe, the beautiful boy (they’re all beautiful, she reminds herself) with the pointed ears, wearing a halo of brown curls atop his head. “Name your price.” Rey says in a voice like steel, a strength that she cannot feel.

  
  


There are only two options before her. She either goes home or she does not.

  
  


“That’s the spirit.” The Queen claps her hands together just once, and the sound rings out into the ballroom. The reverberation it causes is not natural, Rey can feel it as it barrels into her chest. By the time it has reached the black marble walls, the room has gone silent. Every face is turned to the throne, every ear is poised on the Queen’s words. “I propose a game. We’ve not had an entertaining game in quite a while, have we?”

  
  


The crowd rumbles in reply, a cacophonous ringing that ripples throughout the room.

  
  


“Lovely.” The Queen flashes a stunning smile and tosses her hair over her shoulder with one hand. She then holds up three fingers: index, middle, and ring. “Child, I will provide you with a way home, should you partake of three trials. They will test your will, you heart, and your strength. They will not be easily beaten.” She lowers her hand and her mouth curls, gone sour. “And most of all, they will be _amusing_ _._ ”

  
  


Rey feels Poe stiffen at her side. She does not dare look at him. She cannot lose what little courage that she has left. “And if I refuse?” She replies, forcing her face stoic.

  
  


“You most certainly can refuse, I would never _force_ something so difficult upon a mortal,” The Queen sniffs. “But if you do, you will never see your home again. Indeed, you will never leave the Winter Courts again. This will be your home and you will dwell here until you draw your final breath. This I swear to you.”

  
  


Rey clenches her fists. She thinks of her aunt’s little house, perched on the edge of a mighty forest. She thinks of her mother, and her fairy songs. Her mad, sad eyes and her sleepless nights in a cold bed, listening to the sobbing in the walls. And Rey can never go back there, can never face her father after what she had driven in her mother. But she can’t stay here either.

  
  


Rey sets her jaw. “I accept your terms.” She seals her fate with a voice like a prayer.

  
  


The Queen claps her hands together once more and the crowd cheers and cheers. It takes several minutes for the noise to die back down. “Excellent.” She says. She waves a delicate hand in Kylo’s direction. “Since you have already seen fit to take my hunter’s eyes, you may now also take his bed until the end of your stay. You will need him, it can be quite cold here, my dear.” She plucks her glass of blood from between Kylo’s fingers and raises it to her lips. Her eyes never lose Rey’s. She drinks the entire things and smiles, so that Rey can see each and every one of her red-stained teeth.

  
  


There is a heat on Rey’s cheeks and a thrumming in her blood. The drum beat of rage. And then the music picks back up. The revelers begin to dance and sing and laugh. The Queen raises her hand in dismissal, and then goes still, so still she might be carved of marble or ice.

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


Rey gropes for Poe but he has disappeared back into the crowd. She sighs and wraps her arms around her chest. She no longer feels the glow within herself that Maz had tended to bloom. She just feels alone.

  
  


There is a shroud that separates her from the rest of the revelers, the shroud of her own mortality. Rey drifts between the dancers, feels the veil around herself, as though she is a ghost looking in on a world she had left behind long ago.

  
  


A platter made of bone drifts past her on a current she cannot see. It pauses at her and drifts back, tempting her. Atop the platter is a flute and within it something like wine, though it is bubbling and a grey steam vines around the rim of the glass.

Rey takes the fairy wine, letting her fingers curl around the cool stem. She just wants to forget. Forget that she is lost and what being lost has cost her.

  
  


As soon as she has her glass in hand, the platter whisks off to find its next victim. Rey lifts the wine to her lips, prepared to swallow it all in one gulp, but a hand swoops down and blocks the rim from touching her mouth.

  
  


“Really?” Rey gripes. Really. She is now under contract with the Winter Queen - who likely wants to see her dead or worse - and all she wants is a drink and she can’t even have that.

  
  


She turns on her heel and there is Kylo Ren. He has traded his plain black tunic for one that is velvet and silver studded, the buttons shining like stars on a cloudless night sky. His dark hair trails down his neck, and his hands, one of which is still topped over Rey’s cup, are covered in soft black gloves so that his claws cannot be seen.

  
  


“You shouldn’t drink that.” He says, gruffly. “It’s not for you.”

  
  


Rey frowns, looks down at the glass, and Kylo’s hand, and then back up at him. His eyes are still black, still full of ire, still hateful. But soft, too, and there is something sad there that Rey cannot quite put a name too. Is it remorse? Is it regret? “Give me one good reason why – ”

  
  


He plucks the flute from her palm, too swiftly for her to stop him.

  
  


“Hey!”

  
  


He crushes it inside his fist. Rey hears the glass crack, and the steam goes up and away and the fairy wine leaks from between the fingers of his gloves. He curls one lip. “Belladonna,” he says. “Can you not smell the poison?” He opens his fist and the shards of crystal, drops of violet poison, fall to the floor near their feet.

  
  


“Oh,” she says weakly. “No, I can’t.” Then she blinks and her face heats. She reminds herself that he is the one who has gotten her into this mess in the first place. “No, I can’t smell _poison_ , Kylo, and don’t act like that’s a normal thing, because it’s _not_.” She shoves past him, minding her bare feet and the broken glass, ready to dive into the crowd to get away.

  
  


Get away somewhere, anywhere, because for god’s sake she’d almost just drunk a glass full of poison, but she has nowhere to go, not really. She is stuck here. She is stuck here and her only way out is to play a losing game with a Queen of death and ice.

  
  


Rey brings her hands to her face and shudders into herself. She shouldn't be here. She shouldn’t be here and if it wasn’t for her mother she would never have come to her aunt, to the town, to the cottage, to the woods where she’d gotten more lost than she’d ever been before.

  
  


Kylo pads up behind her and sighs, but he does not touch her. He allows her to grieve and she will not allow herself to feel grateful for it. Finally, he says, “You… ” He starts and for a moment Rey thinks he is going to apologize and the words are just stuck in his throat. “Are an idiot.”

  
  


Rey gathers up a fist and throws it at Kylo’s nose before she can think twice and lose her nerve.

  
  


Kylo catches her hand easily and holds onto it. “Fool.” He spits like a curse. He presses his gloved fingers around hers and they burn with the cold and he stares at her, cavernous, as though he could devour all of her and leave nothing behind.

  
Rey has to yank her hand three times before he releases her. She doesn’t like the way his gaze makes her feel. Like she can’t breathe with fever, like there is something swimming in her gut. She rubs at her skin where he had touched her, trying to banish the chill from her bones.

  
  


He is still staring at her, perhaps seeing her for the first time. His gaze drops from her shoeless feet and wanders back up to the glimmer on her neck, the gems woven in her hair. His brows come together. “Where did you get all of this?”

  
  


Kylo reaches out to brush a flower blossoming on Rey’s shoulder and she bats him away. She is not sure if she should tell him about Maz. She is not sure if trusts him, or if she should truly trust anyone in this place. An idea comes to her and she swallows. “My fairy godmother.” She says.

  
  


“You lie.” He says as though she has scalded him.

  
  


“And so what if I do?” She counters. “You can’t make me tell you anything.”

  
  


“I saved your life.” He growls, low.

  
  


“No one asked you to save my life!”

  
  


He considers her, takes one, two, three large steps around her and lords himself over her. He is tall and broad, and she feels smaller than she ever has beside him. Kylo Ren with his black hair and his black eyes gone hooded, Rey with the violet buds trailing down her chest, her heart trying to leap out of it. “I can take whatever I want from you, even the truth.” He says it like a promise. Then. “Dance with me.” It is not a request.

  
  


“Never.” Rey snarls.

  
  


There is something of the wild in her. She sees the look on his face when she denies him, the way he goes even darker, and it thrills her.

  
  


Rey spins circles on the balls of her feet and dashes into the crowd of dancers. Let him dream to think he can catch her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote this just after TLJ, so this story has Kylo grow from his TFA persona. Personally, I like mean and surly Kylo, but he definitely gets softer for Rey as time goes on.
> 
> Yes, I wrote a genderbent Queen Snoke. I love the evil queen trope. I will not take this back. Like I said, I wrote this after TLJ way before TROS (not my fave btw). So Snoke was the big bad and that's how it's going to be in this story as well.


	7. about twelve by the moon-dial

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for: a bit of gore, attempted sexual assault (not Reylo)
> 
> I haven’t had to tag TW in previous fics so please let me know if it has been done incorrectly or if something should be added.

The girl _runs_ from him.

  
  


Kylo offers to take her in arm and she _runs_.

  
  


He stands, stunned still and there is a beating in his chest that wasn’t there before. He finds that he can still be surprised, even after all this time, but that he no longer knows what it means.

  
  


He feels the pull to give chase like fire in his veins. He flexes his fingers, digs his claws into the creases of his palms - _one, two, three_ \- the biting of his flesh meant to quell his rising ache, the yearning, despicable and unwanted.

  
  


The bite of pain only makes him want her more, want the hunt more. The desire leaves him breathless, almost quaking to his knees.

  
  


_Desire for it, the hunt, not for the girl_ , he tells himself and he is not sure if he believes it. He cannot fight this.

  
  


He smells her, bergamot, rosemary, _spring_ and his nostrils flare. The scent she leaves is a breadcrumb trail and he follows, unbidden, until he catches sight of the end of her beige skirts brushing the bare of her calves.

  
  


She is struggling gracelessly, trying to squeeze her way through a pack of satyrs. It would be humorous, watching her squirm, if she wasn’t willingly feeding herself to the horned monsters.

  
  


The satyrs pinch at her and laugh, tugging at the lilacs blooming along her ribs, the rose quartz tangled in the locks of her hair. One of them nudges her with his horns, curling obsidian against the tan of her soft skin. The girl is spirited - he has seen it in her, it is what makes him want to break her all the more - she shoves back hard against this satyr that has dared to touch her

  
  


Kylo knows what this will do to the beast. The spark of fear in the prey’s eyes, the bloodlust it inspires. They are all the same, and Kylo is a beast himself, after all.

  
  


The satyr roars in delight. He twines one arm around the girl’s waist, the other in her hair. She shrieks with indignation and this only pleases him more. The creature holds her pinned in place, presses his hooved legs into the pleats of her dress and his mouth against her neck.

  
  


Foolish girl, thrice the fool as she screams into the cold air. The hoard of satyrs heave themselves around her, thrilled with the fright in her voice, each wanting a piece of her to taste as well.

  
  


For a moment, Kylo thinks he will turn his back and let them have her. They could rend her pretty limbs from her torso, lap her blood from the floor. Then he would never again be forced to doubt himself in the face of her eyes - wide and veined with green, the tremulous timber of worry in her voice as she speaks to him.

  
  


But then she wails, and there is her sorrow-laced terror, and his blood sings at the sound and he thinks - she had run from him. She is his prey by rights, and when did Kylo Ren let another claim his trophy as their own?

  
  


He steps forward, hand on the hilt of his sword. A gasp falls from the girl’s red, red lips when he wraps the whole of his hand about her shoulder. He is sure that she can feel his claws digging into her even through his gloves. He is not gentle. He breaks her from the satyr’s grasp with little enough effort, pulls her to his side then to his back. Let him deal with the petty blows of halfwitted goat-men.

  
  


The heft of his blade is easy in his palm - it is easier still to arch the curve of it into the satyr’s throat, the one with the curling black horns who had his mouth on Kylo’s mortal girl. Black blood, streaming hot, pours from the wound as the thing gurgles and Kylo pushes the blade fully through the bones of his neck. The crunch of the spine, the sigh of satyr’s soul as it leaves its body, quells the thrumming in Kylo’s chest to nothing.

  
  


The other satyrs - frenzied, desperate things - launch themselves onto the corpse and begin to tear at it. They are close to the animals they so lord themselves above, bleating and gnashing at the flesh of their fallen brother.

  
  


Kylo turns to Rey and sees - ah, yes, there - the look on her face, the one that says he truly is a monster and now she knows it too. He smiles, and he means it to be as nasty as it looks, and her whole body shakes.

  
  


Then she steps forward, her bare feet dip into the pool of blood that is spreading sticky scarlet across the tile. She does not flinch.

  
  


He must look a frightful, cruel thing. The curved blade in his hands, dripping crimson. His teeth, every one of them pointed. His breath falling in ragged gasps. His hair black and wild and the fevered silver stars in his eyes. But Rey, the girl, comes close to him, the maiden and the monster.

  
  


She crooks her fingers into his open palm and presses her cheek against his arm and says, “thank you.” In a voice that sounds so like a prayer, he nearly does not hear it.

  
  


* * *

  
  


A few mornings later, Rey is woken early by a knock at the door. 

  
  


Or, rather, she imagines it is early as she has no clock to go off of. There is a sundial propped on the small table, split in half and held together by shining brass hinges. The inside is a painted grey morning sky. A sliver of light falls against the gnomon and casts a shadow, but Rey cannot tell where the light is coming from and she cannot read the little letters carved into the wood. 

  
  


Kylo is distinctly absent, so there is no one she can ask.

  
  


He had beckoned her to follow him that night - after. She had found her fingers curled into his palm for a second time. And she did follow him. There was nowhere else to go. There was no one else she trusted, though the trust she felt for him was lowly won in blood and fear.

  
  


She has not seen him since he had led her back to his rooms. She doesn’t know where he has gone, only that he is gone, little more than a wraith. What had she expected? It’s not like he was going to share his bed with her. It’s not that she wanted him there.

  
  


She is probably becoming a poster child for Stockholm Syndrome. That’s what it means, isn’t it? Compassion for one's captor. She shakes her head in a paltry attempt to rid herself of her heart, traitor that it is. The stones are still sewn into her hair, though they've loosened, and they knock against her ears as though saying, _nice try._

  
  


Rey had not wandered the halls during her stay, though restlessness nipped at her heels each day and there became an incessant buzzing in her brain. She is not sure what monsters lurk in the shadows on the walls.

  
  


Food had appeared at the door in regular intervals - hard black bread with butter or cheese, a meaty stew, golden-crusted pies, even strawberries and melon dusted with sugar like fallen snow. She thinks perhaps Maz has been helping her again.

  
  


Rey found she could even read some of the books - though they were all fairy tales she’d read growing up, except the endings were wrong. Like dreams turned to nightmares, they ended in tragedy. A mermaid turning to sea foam in the morning light, a pair of sisters with their eyes pecked out by hungry birds, stolen babes and murdered children.

  
  


It turns Rey’s stomach, perhaps because she has nearly met her own end several times over since she began this journey. But there is nothing else to do and so she continues to read them until she can’t stand it anymore and then she sleeps, sleeps like the dead.

  
  


The rapping at the door will not cease and so she spills off of the divan that she’d curled up on the night before. She swipes at her eyes and, still bleary and a little angry, opens the door with a glare and a short, “What is it?”

  
  


The fae on the other side of the door is dressed in white, the buttons of his fine shirt winking gold against his throat. She can see the pointed tips of his ears peeking out from beneath his dark curls. He had been tapping a steel-tipped boot against the black glass, creating a tinny melody to a song Rey did not know. When she opens the door, he falls motionless and peers down at her. There is something like wonder on his face.

  
  


“So,” he says. “ _You’re_ the one everyone is talking about.”

  
  


Rey blinks. Her brain is slow with sleep, like coming out of a fog. "Oh." She says. "I guess so." Then she frowns, his words finally beginning to piece themselves together into some semblance of sense, and she squints at him in disbelief. "Did you say 'everyone'?"

The man hums his affirmation. “The whole court is buzzing about the human girl who’s taking on the Queen’s trials. There are bets going. Some of them think you’re already dead.” His eyes trail her up and down as though he is making sure that she is, indeed, still alive. “I’m giving you halfway through the first one.” He says, holding up his index finger.

  
  


This time the words process immediately and Rey's face pinches. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.” She spits and slams the door in his face. She has just enough time to see his brows shoot up in surprise and relish the spark of satisfaction that rolls through her chest.

  
  


The man doesn’t take the hint, or perhaps believes he is more stubborn than Rey is. This would be a gross miscalculation. He knocks several more times and when it becomes clear that Rey will not open up again, he calls, “The Queen is summoning you.” He sings it like a taunt, his words sliding through the fine grain of the wooden door.

Rey feels the air seize in her lungs.

  
  


The Queen is summoning her. Rey doesn’t know what she expected. That the Queen would never make good on her promise, that Rey would continue to eat sweet berries and read fairy stories in a darkened room until the end of time.

  
  


But then she would never go home.

  
  


Rey yanks open the door just as the man is spinning on his heel and making to stride away from her. He has clearly decided she is not his problem anymore. If Rey were smarter, maybe she wouldn’t be.

  
  


“Hold it!” Her voice reverberates down the hall and she hears herself, the wobble of hesitation there, again and again.

  
  


He stutters to a stop and turns so that she can see the bridge of his nose sloping into a smirk.

  
  


“I don’t know the way.” Rey is weak, and dizzy with disgust for her weakness.

  
  


The man turns back to look at her and squints, giving her another once over. Rey finds herself clenching her teeth as she waits for him to decide if he will deign to help her. She doesn't know what she will do if he refuses - wander the halls until she dies of thirst or is eaten by monster, perhaps, or sleep her life away in Kylo's room until the castle crumbles around her.

But then he sighs, not as though he is too important to play chaperone, but like he is weary with the weight of the world on his shoulders. He gestures impatiently for her to follow. Rey looks down at herself, then back at him, and chews on her bottom lip.

  
  


When Kylo had brought her back to his room, Rey had washed the blood from the soles of her feet and he had given her one of his tunics to wear - he had nothing else. On top of which, it seemed he only owned clothes in black. The shirt is shapeless on her, the silky fabric dangling past her knees. She has to roll the sleeves, two, three, four times to finally see her hands again. And it - well, it smells of him. Like pine and ash and chicory. Like something feral in the wood.

  
  


The dress is still there, hanging off of the bed, but Rey can’t bring herself to put it on again.

  
  


“Are you coming?” He asks, breaking into her reverie, and Rey nods, despite herself. If the Queen wanted her to look presentable upon being summoned, she should have thought to provide the finery herself.

  
  


Rey walks with him, shoe-less and bedraggled, through the winding halls. They are going in a different direction from the ballroom and Rey is thankful that she pressed him for his guidance. She would never have hoped to find her way in the maze that is this castle otherwise.

  
  


They walk in silence for so long that Rey’s legs grow tired and she feels the restlessness seep into her again. It starts in her fingers and slowly creeps up to her scalp, tingling between her shoulder blades.

  
  


She knows she is not supposed to ask his name. She tries not to. She really does, but she keeps thinking of it and finally the question falls from her lips. She has never been very good at following rules, and has even less of an propensity for keeping her mouth shut.

  
  


The man nearly topples over his own long legs when she asks and she internally curses herself. He peers at her with his large brown eyes and purses his lips, black brows knitting together. “Are you allowed to ask me that?”

  
  


It is Rey’s turn to sigh. “Probably not,” she admits. “Just forget I said anything.” She tries to swallow down the pink in her cheeks along with her embarrassment. She had thought, but then, the fullness of his lips and the light in his eyes makes him look almost like her. Almost human, save for the tips of his ears.

  
  


He considers her, then smiles, soft and kinder than he has any obligation to be. “I’m Finn.” He offers.

  
  


“Finn,” she says, rolling the name in her mouth. “I’m - ”

  
  


“You don’t have to tell me.”

  
  


“I’m Rey.”

  
  


Finn's mouth pops open and he regards her like a deer caught in the headlights of a fast-moving car. “That’s dangerous. You can just give your name to anyone, Rey.” He says and he is scolding her. As though Rey hasn’t gotten it drilled into her brain how dangerous this place is. But she wants to trust someone - anyone else that is not Kylo Ren.

  
  


“I’m not _giving_ it, I’m just telling you. So you have something to call me.”

  
  


“Don’t you know?” Finn asks her, looking aghast.

  
  


Rey presses her lips together in a firm line and shakes her head. She knows nothing, nothing at all.

  
  


“The folk - that’s us - we collect humans like trinkets, hoard them like gold,” he says, his brown eyes shining. “And if you know someone’s name, then you have power over them. You can control them, make them do your bidding, make them do anything.”

  
  


Rey frowns. “But why? We have nothing to offer you that you don’t already have.”

  
  


“Because humans are alive and the folk - they’re not, not really. They’re like glass, like the ice hanging from the eaves, unchanging, never-ending. Humans are like flowers, blooming in their youth with pink cheeks and warm skin and a song on their lips. It’s enchantment to them, to us.” Finn sounds far away, as though he himself has been taken in by the spell, as though he is imagining his own mortal to pour over.

  
  


“So then that’s why Kylo brought me here.” Rey says bitterly.

  
  


“Kylo Ren,” He echoes. “You came to the Winter Court with Kylo Ren?”

  
  


“Yes,” she admits. “I was lost - and there was a wolf, and then he killed it - and then… and then he brought me here.”

  
  


“You really don’t know.” Finn looks vaguely horrified.

  
  


Rey’s brows come together. “No, I don’t.”

  
  


Then he takes her hand. Or he tries to. Rey pulls her fingers out of his palm and looks at him like he has burned her and he blinks at her with his long black lashes as though he cannot believe she would dare deny him. He beckons her, instead, into a nook. Rey casts a sideways glance behind her. “I’ll be late.” She says, uncertain.

  
  


“Nevermind that now.”

  
  


Rey swallows her fears with the lump in her throat and goes with him. The alcove is a little closet lined with wooden shelves that sag under the weight of moth-eaten books. Rey’s fingers long to stroke their spines but she admonishes them to stay still.

  
  


Finn looks like he wants to touch her again, to take her by the shoulders, to hold her hand, but Rey’s eyes are sharp on him and he doesn’t dare. Instead he breathes, “If Kylo Ren brought you here, you are doomed to die a frightful death.”

  
  


It pierces her heart, like lance slipping just there, between the notches in her ribs.

  
  


“He brings girls, sometimes,” Finn rushes on, not noticing or perhaps pretending not to notice the look like anguish on her face. “They fade away like plants without water, or the Queen eats their hearts.” He gives her a slanted look. “I _heard_ she does anyway.” He amends and clears his throat. “He doesn’t care. He’s not like some of the others here who take humans and keep them.”

  
  


“Is that how you came to be?”

  
  


Finn’s nostrils flare. “You -”

  
  


“I don't mean to offend you if I'm wrong, I am alot. But you just look so _alive_.”

  
  


Finn scrubs a hand through his hair and lets loose a heavy sigh. “It's my mother. She was - ”

  
  


“You don’t have to tell me.” She throws his own words back at him.

  
  


“No... it’s okay.” He draws a shuddering breath. “My mother was brought here and got a child on her by her fair lover and then she died. She died because mortal women aren’t meant to carry glass or ice in their bellies. And I grew up on scraps and snow because no one would have a half-human brat to tend, but that’s okay because the folk don’t make very good parents as it were.”

  
  


“I’m sorry.” Rey offers, very small. Finn looks haggard, haunted by the ghost of a hungry boy with the nothing but snow for company. Alone and afraid.

  
  


“It doesn’t matter.” He shakes his head, chasing his memories away. “You have to go, get as far as you can from here. You can’t let him find you, you can’t let him have you.”

  
  


Rey’s cheeks burn. “I have nowhere to go.” She says quietly. “And I have already made a pact with the Queen.”

  
  


“I know a place - ” Finn begins but the door to the little room pushes open, nearly hitting Rey and sending her tumbling against Finn's chest. Then there is a long arm and a fist wrapped around the thin of her wrist and she is being dragged into the hall.

  
  


Rey yelps and tries to yank herself back, her feet scrabbling against the tile, but she is held in a bruising vice. She looks up, seething, into black eyes set in a pale face and mouth, red as sin, twisted into a scowl.

  
  


Kylo bares his teeth at her. “You were told to come to the throne room.”

  
  


Finn steps out from the alcove after Rey. He holds out a hand as though he wants to pull her from Kylo’s grip. Rey is not sure that he could even if he tried. “Let go of her.” He says, his voice gone very cold. 

  
  


“And you,” he turns on Finn. “Were commanded to bring her before the Queen. Have you chosen to betray your obligations? Your station?” Kylo snarls and pulls Rey even closer to him, so that she is pressed into the column of his chest. “Yet here I come to find you two half-breeds _gallivanting_.” Kylo sneers at Rey. “I should have known, like calls to like, your mortal blood singing to one another.”

  
  


“Don't you dare talk to her like that.” Finn thunders, arching his neck and crowding into Kylo's space. "You're not better than her. You're a dog, lower than that even." He steps between Rey and Kylo. Not _us_ he had said, _her,_ and Rey’s heart aches at the loyalty tremoring in his voice, a loyalty that she has not earned.

  
  


Rey sees the look on Kylo’s face, the barely contained storm in his brow, the unending stoke of his fury. He raises his empty palm, arches his claws, shining and black. Not even with his sword, just his hands, and she knows very suddenly that he will kill Finn. He will kill Finn and he will not even flinch. He will not even care for the blood running red down his fingers.

  
  


“Stop.” Rey demands. She will not let Finn die for her dignity. “ _Stop_. I can take care of myself, Finn. I don’t need your help. And Kylo, I will go with you, I swear, just please..." She inhales sharply, the bite of Kylo's grip winding up her arm. "You’re hurting me.”

  
  


At once, Kylo drops her, as though her skin has scalded him. There is a look in his eyes, something like regret, or perhaps it is only dismay that she has denied him his bloodlust.

  
  


“Rey - ” Finn says.

  
  


Rey curls her lip at him and she wonders if Finn sees it there, that she wants him to keep living, because she blinks and he is gone, as though he’d pulled the air around himself as a cloak. 

  
  


And Kylo - he doesn’t say another word, but his shoulders quake as with unspent fury, as though he can't stand to breathe against her. And Rey steps after him in the shadows his steps make.


End file.
